


Doppelganger

by Stratagem



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Alec is the BEST big brother, Clones, Gen, Mini-Clone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-08-30 18:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 51,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8544859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stratagem/pseuds/Stratagem
Summary: Alec know Manticore had an obsession with clones and genetic manipulation, but this is too much. When Alec finds his little X8 female replica, his world gets that much weirder.





	1. Chapter 1

Trash cans were never a good place to go looking for a meal. No one really threw away anything but bread crusts, coffee grounds and beer cans, and if they tossed out anything good like half a sandwich or out-of-date meat, you could bet that one of the hundreds of homeless regular people had gotten to that trashcan first.

She avoided trash-picking when she could. She was good at charming people and had been invited to numerous houses for dinner, but sometimes there just wasn't anyone to con a meal out of when she was between places to stay. In the six and a half months she had been out of Manticore, she had been through three orphanages, two foster homes, and she had forgotten how many run-down, awful shelters where the rich people tried to do the right thing and send food to the thousands of homeless people. They were always overcrowded, and she only stayed at them long enough to grab a meal, usually a packet of instant noodles or something else generic, and run off again.

To hide her identity, she had gone by a variety of names: Megan Jameson, Georgia Niles, Lily Tatem, Jessi Campbell and a few others. Phonebooks were great resources when looking for new names.

Her real name? Besides the designation X8-270, she didn't have one.

270 couldn't afford to stay in the same place for long, no matter how good the food was or how nice the people were. Staying somewhere for longer than a couple weeks meant giving people too much time to figure out her weirdness, to memorize her face, to get close to her. Not to mention she would start feeling attached to the place, and with her territorial ocelot DNA, that was never good. So she moved. A lot. Sometimes all that moving meant missing out on sleep and real food, but she dealt with it. She was trained to deal with it.

If she was going dumpster-diving, like tonight, she preferred the trash bins outside of the neon-lit, store-front Chinese restaurants. She had found out soon after Manticore had blown up that a half-eaten egg roll with some orange duck sauce on it was pretty wonderful if she hadn't eaten for a couple days.

Chinese restaurants were good, too, because sometimes the cooks would leave extra food out for the stray cats, and she could eat with them. They didn't mind her, probably because they realized that she was sort of one of them in a way. She was probably too much like them now, half-feral from her time spent roaming the streets.

Tonight there was no one to trick a meal from, and no one had left food out for the cats. She nudged an empty metal tray with the tip of her sneaker and huffed a sigh as she glanced over at the rusting metal dumpster. It was massive. No wonder none of the other homeless people had claimed it.

At seven-years-old, she had been one of the oldest soldiers…kids in her unit, but she had also been shorter than most of them, small for her age. It had earned her the nickname 'Runt' from the scientists and doctors and the staff and even their handler, Colonel Channing. She hated it.

Crossing the empty alley, she shimmied up the stack of wooden boxes beside the bin and then lowered herself inside. She grabbed onto the side of the dumpster as her feet sunk into the fried rice and chicken lo mein; cold teriyaki sauce soaked into her jeans and a slimy, wet wonton somehow wriggled its way into her sock. It smelled rancid, and she doubted that a trash truck had been by that week. It was a good thing that she didn't need to eat much.

She knelt down in the garbage and started pawing through the refuse on top. Hopefully someone had tossed out a takeout box that some customer had forgotten to take with them in their haste to leave the shop. Those were always the best because the food usually hadn't touched the garbage.

Finding a small white takeout box full of some spicy chicken and rice, she grinned and looked around for a discarded pack of unused chopsticks. She picked up a pair in a bright red paper packet with white Chinese writing and stuck them into the pocket of her oversized hoodie. Moving quietly and quickly, she slinked over to the side of the dumpster and pulled herself out of the metal behemoth.

Her stomach rumbled as she started to head out of the alley. Even though it was someone's leftovers, the smell slipping out from the takeout was mouthwatering to a kid who hadn't eaten in a while.

Hunger clouded her judgment. She crouched down in the shadows between the trash bin and the pile of empty boxes and opened the takeout box. The thick, prickly smell of Asian spices assaulted her heightened senses. She almost sneezed, but she rubbed her nose and stopped herself.

Little fingers that could snap a human neck picked up the wooden chopsticks and started rummaging through the chicken and rice. She ate fast, barely chewing her food. Back at Manticore, if you didn't finish a meal in time, you didn't eat the next one.

She was almost finished with the takeout when the back door to the restaurant swung open and couple of men stepped out into the back alley, laughing. She froze, not letting a muscle twitch, as a man in a grey suit and a pair of shiny black shoes walked in front of her hiding place. Beside him was a shorter man, this one wearing a black suit with similarly shiny black shoes. From what she could tell from their body language, the man in grey was the alpha and the other guy was in his unit, probably the beta.

The man in grey lit a cigarette and puffed light grey smoke clouds into the air as he walked around the back alley. Her nose crinkled as wisps of smoke drifted toward her. She hated the smell of cigarettes.

The man pulled his cigarette from his mouth and tapped it against his fingers. Little orange embers fell to the ground, and she was the only one who heard them sizzle as they went out. "I think this is gonna be a good take for us, if we can push it through like we want to."

"It's a new drug, Mr. Krenski, people will be all over it," replied the guy in black. He was watching the other man with quiet admiration and loyalty in his light brown eyes. He stank of jealousy. Definitely the beta. "They'll have to buy it when they figure out what it can do."

"Supposed to send you to another universe," said the alpha. He blew a stream of smoke out of his nose, and she thought that he looked like he was breathing fire. A fire-breathing man, but oddly not Manticore. There was no barcode above the starched collar.

"Is it lethal?"

The man in grey nodded. "It'll kill you after a few hits, but with what we're going to charge for an ounce, losing clientele won't matter much."

"Hmm, good deal."

Both men shared a smile, and the alpha took a long drag from his cigarette.

"Coming in from Hong Kong?" asked the beta.

"Yeah, the squints really know how to make the good stuff. It'll be here Thursday night." Smoke bellowed from his mouth as he laughed. "Landing at the Mason strip 'cause I couldn't convince them to take it anywhere else. Said it'd be too risky, yellow dogs."

They talked for a little while longer about the drugs and then some woman they were both having sex with for fun. 270 stayed silent, barely breathing, hidden deep in the shadows. Her fingers tightened around the takeout box as a rat scampered out from underneath the trash bin, leaving little paw prints behind it in the grime. It sniffed around the trash bin, its nose twitching rapidly and then stopped.

The rat looked up at her, beady eyes quivering in terror. It had caught a whiff of her scent and smelled the twinge of cat in her blood. Terrified that it would make a noise, she darted out a hand and snapped its neck, but it managed to squeal the second before its spinal cord was severed. 270 yanked her hand back and stared at the men as the rat fell limp on the broken asphalt.

"What was that?" the alpha snapped, his dark eyes zeroing in on her hiding spot. For a moment, she thought that he had seen her, but his eyes were focused above her. He couldn't see her in the shadows.

"Nothing. Probably just a stray," said the other man. He kicked at one of the empty metal trays that were left out for the cats. "Damn yellows are always feeding them so they can catch them after hours."

"I always thought teriyaki chicken looked sideways," said the alpha. He chuckled at his own joke, and the beta joined in obediently. Through the laughter, she still heard when the alpha male slipped his hand into his jacket and pulled out his gun, clicking the safety off as he slid the piece from its holster.

Her instincts kicked in as he aimed the gun at her hiding spot; he was quicker than other humans, probably from practice in hostile situations. There wasn't time to think. She gathered herself together, adrenaline zinging through her veins, and sprang from the shadows, her small body becoming a lithe, living arrow.

Knocking the gun from the alpha's hand, she landed on one foot before jumping up to slam a high kick against his beta's jaw. There was a sickening pop as his jaw dislocated, and he bellowed in pain, clutching at his chin.

Speed and power whipped through her as she grabbed the alpha's right wrist and twisted, breaking his gun hand. While the beta fell to his knees, still holding his jaw, the alpha stumbled backward. Heart pounding, 270 stood between the two men, her shoulders squared, feet apart in a defensive stance, fists resting at her hips.

"What the hell?" the alpha, Krenski, demanded. He was holding his shattered wrist to his chest and staring at her with narrowed eyes. "What the hell is this?"

 _A kid kicking your butt,_ she thought to herself, but she kept the tart remark to herself. Her memory could recall the pain from the fist against her cheek the last time she had said something smart to Channing back at Manticore.

The beta roared something unintelligible, and she looked at both men. They were injured and couldn't do her any more harm. Her training told her to finish them off, but her body told her to run, and this time her gut won out over her head.

270 turned her back on the men and blurred down the alley, heading toward the street. There was a shelter in Sector 10 that would probably take her tonight, and that was far enough away from here that they would never think to look for her there.

Veering right, she was almost onto the sidewalk when a gun cracked behind her. Her eyes widened in fear, and she tried to dodge out of the way, but she didn't move quickly enough. Not enough experience with live ammo.

She jerked as the bullet grazed her right side, tearing through her skin like it was tissue paper. Gritting her teeth, she surged forward and put one hand over the bleeding wound as the weird burning sensation that came with being shot heated her side. There was too much adrenaline in her system for her to feel the real pain yet, something she supposed she should be grateful for.

Blurring, she made it six blocks before the adrenaline started wearing off. Pulling her hood up, she slowed down to a walk and tried to keep to the side of the street, where no one would notice a kid walking by herself at night.

Pain started to spread through her torso and down to her thighs like someone had poured electricity into her bloodstream to replace the adrenaline. Glancing down at the wound, she saw wet, sticky redness seeping from where her hand was pressed against her side. The blood was hot against her palm and fingers. Even with the pressure she was applying, it was soaking through her black t-shirt and onto her hoodie, a burgundy splotch against the dark material. You sure did bleed a lot when a chunk of flesh got blown off your body.

She leaned against a cold brick wall and tried to think. Where did she want to go? Where _could_ she go? She needed to patch herself up quick, before she lost more blood. Reaching up with her free hand, she brushed her fingers against her barcode. She couldn't go to a hospital, no way.

Her eyes darted around, trying to assess her situation. She was in a residential section full of apartment buildings and tenements. Maybe there was an empty apartment where she could rest and clean up her wound. A bandage would be nice; at least then she wouldn't be bleeding everywhere.

Pushing away from the wall, she stood up as straight as she could and walked toward the nearest apartment building. She was heading up the stoop when she recognized a familiar scent. A trace of a spice, ginger maybe, and pine and something subtly citrusy. It was her…but not. There were other smells in the scent, embers and earth before a thunderstorm. Those weren't hers. But she had smelled them before, somewhere she couldn't remember right now.

The scent, mixed with a lot of other people's smells, was stuck to the door handle and the door jam, the concrete steps and the door. She looked around, trying to remember if she had been here before in her roaming around. She didn't recognize the place. The address sign beside the door read 113-125th Place, and this was Sector 5, not one of her regular sectors.

270 rubbed her forehead and started up the steps again. Her foot clipped the last step and she fell forward, her hands hitting the door, one landing on the handle while the other pressed against the peeling paint. With each breath she took, it felt like someone was stuffing more smoldering coals into her injured side. She had to rest. As she took a deep, hitching breath, the scent filled her nose again, triggering her territorial mindset. The scent wasn't hers, but it was so close and so strong…maybe she could pretend it was.

The door to the apartment building had been left unlocked and the hallway with its ugly peach-painted walls was empty. She followed the smell to a dark brown door and grabbed the brass doorknob. This door was locked, but a simple shove broke the deadbolt and had her inside a small apartment that was _soaked_ with the scent that was hers but wasn't.

The apartment was a hodgepodge of swirled green walls, mismatched furniture, diamond-pattern floors, a massive book case and arches. It was random and chaotic, nothing like Manticore, and it was almost beautiful in its ugliness.

Tentatively, she moved into the middle of the room, gazing around the apartment to get her bearings. Dirty clothes, blue jeans and a navy turtleneck sweater on the red chair, a grey blanket thrown over the ivory couch, a TV remote on the table and TV to the side, no books disturbed from the shelf, a couple windows for a quick escape, no an open kitchen, an unmade bed in the next room…

Her tired eyes zeroed in on the bed. Manticore told her that she needed to suck it up and clean up her gunshot wound and get out. It was stupid to stay here, someone lived here, someone that smelled like her, but she wanted to go to sleep so bad, and Manticore wasn't really there and neither was the person, but the bed was and she wanted to sleep. Besides, even if it wasn't her smell, it almost was, so she could claim it, or at least in this state of mind she could. She'd leave later, soon, whenever she woke up and whoever it belonged to wouldn't know she'd been there.

Sluggish footsteps took her into the small bedroom. Fuzzy memories of the few basic medical classes she had been trained in by Manticore demanded that she at least tie something around her wound to make sure the bleeding stopped. She pulled a white t-shirt off of a hangar in the closet and ripped the bottom of it into one long strip.

Shrugging out of her hoodie sent flames across her body, and it dropped from her hands to pile on the floor once she had gotten it off. She didn't want to look at the wound, so she sat down on the side of the bed and hastily wrapped the cloth strip around her stomach, not even bothering to take her t-shirt off.

Heat from a vent on the other side of the room warmed her skin, and the fluffy pillows invited her to lie down, to fall asleep, and she wasn't arguing. After kicking off her shoes, she crawled onto the bed and lied down on top of the ruffled blankets. Her head fell against the pillow, and the familiar, disconcerting yet somehow comforting scent filled her nose as she drifted off into a heavy, healing sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

It was almost impossible for Alec to get drunk. He could waste a week's pay check and barely get a buzz. He had been well-designed, and in some part of his intricate, piece-by-piece, mosaic DNA coding was a gene from an Irish guy that let him hold inexplicable amounts of hard liquor without needing to find the nearest toilet to hurl his dinner into. He had never had a hangover in his life. A good soldier couldn't fight with a hangover.

So when he walked into his apartment, the barely-there buzz that had him feeling pretty good dissipated instantly when he saw his broken door frame.

Alec's shoulders tensed as he gently pushed on the door, letting it swing into the apartment. His muscles bunched and drew taut as he unconsciously reverted to Manticore Assassin Mode. Someone had broken into his apartment, and whoever it was could possibly still be there. However, as long as his intruder wasn't a transgenic or some crazy Familiar, he was pretty sure he could take whoever it was, no problem.

The living room was empty. He tossed his jacket onto the couch and looked around. It didn't look like anyone was there. No one ducking down behind the couch or hiding underneath the card table.

He walked over to the kitchen and leaned over the counter. If anyone was in the kitchen, they were hiding out in the cabinets. Probably drinking his good Scotch too. But he doubted anyone would hide in his cabinets; it was just too much work, and you'd have to be a contortionist. There was also the pantry, but he had taken to stashing everything he stole in there until he could sell it later, so right now it was packed full of TVs and stereo systems. That left the bathroom and his bedroom as probable hiding spots.

Alec rubbed his forehead. He wasn't really feeling up for this. He had been planning on drinking another couple glasses of Scotch before crashing. So much for that.

He leaned against the kitchen doorway and crossed his arms. "Hey, if you're still here, I suggest you go ahead and come out. Maybe I won't break both your arms." Not that he was likely to waste his energy breaking any bones anyway if the burglar didn't put up a fight, but intimidation tactics were usually useful in making a person compliant.

No one came whimpering out of hiding.

"Fine, have it your way, but I'm not shelling out any cash to have your arms put in casts."

He pushed away from the doorway and grabbed the doorknob to the bathroom. He couldn't hear anyone in there, and ordinary humans usually made a lot of noise. Maybe his thief had already made off with the goods. The only problem was that it looked like nothing had been stolen. What kind of burglar breaks in and doesn't steal anything?

A burglar that isn't really a burglar…

He opened the bathroom door. No one. His towels were on the floor where he had dropped them that morning, the sink was dripping, and the toilet seat was still up. Good. Fine. No burglar there.

Alec shut the bathroom door and walked toward his bedroom slowly, silently. The open archway was dark, so whoever his burglar was hadn't felt like turning on the lights if they were in there.

The vent on the other side of the bedroom huffed warm air, and suddenly Alec got a nose full of a harsh, metallic scent that he knew too well. Blood.

He stepped into his bedroom, fingertips twitching as if anticipating an attack. Once a super soldier, always a super soldier.

His eyes focused in on the bed. He blinked. Once. Twice. "The hell…"

There was a bump on his bed. A small, kid-sized bump curled up on top of his blankets, its head pressed against his pillow. He couldn't tell if the kid was a girl or a boy; short, dark blonde hair was flopped over its face, and it was wearing generic clothing, blue jeans and a black t-shirt. Did it really matter anyway? The little punk had broken into his house for a good night's sleep and probably cleaned out his fridge in the process. Now he'd have to dump it at a sector station or a shelter.

He took a step closer, ready to shove the twerp off his bed when he caught sight of the white cloth belt around its waist. Huh, that looked weird. It wasn't a belt. It was a piece of a white t-shirt…and lying in a heap on the floor at the end of the bed was one of his t-shirts, the bottom ripped off. The way the kid was curled up looked sort of strange, shoulders curled in, knees pulled up, like an animal protecting a wound.

Near his foot was a kid-sized navy hoodie, covered with some large, darker stain. Alec bent down and picked it up; it was starting to stiffen with half-dried blood. He dropped it back on the floor. Damn it. The scent of blood was coming from the kid. It had probably been in some kind of gang fight; those sort of street wars were always breaking out among the undisciplined brats in the city.

Sighing, he reached over and flipped on the lights, nearly blinding himself in the process. The kid stirred and sat up, head bowed, its hair obscuring its face. Alec cleared his throat. "Look, Scruffy, I don't know why you decided to crawl up in here and die, but how about I take yo-"

He was interrupted by a flash of wild, eerily familiar hazel eyes, and the kid flew off the bed in a perfectly executed back flip.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, cool it!" he shouted. His eyes telescoped on the black barcode tattoo on the kid's neck, reading the numbers.

335198036270.

The kid was transgenic. One of his kind.

Shit.

The landing was off, and the kid stumbled, taking down the lamp from his bedside table and ending up underneath the window in a protective ball. The kid grunted in pain and grabbed at its side, but those eyes stayed on him, staring at him with tension and fear. The small face was covered in grime and dirt, but if he had to guess, he'd say that this was a girl, only about seven or eight, one of the X8 ankle-biters. She reminded him of someone, but he couldn't quite place it. Maybe he had seen her in the hallways at Manticore before.

Alec held up his hands as he approached the girl. "Hold it, soldier," he said, keeping his voice low and hopefully something close to gentle. He didn't want to scare the trembling, injured transgenic child at his feet.

When she started scrambling backward, trying to find refuge between the wall and his bedside table, he turned around and pulled down the collar of his turtleneck. "Look, I'm like you, okay?" He turned back around and met her wide-eyed gaze. "So quit doing the whole scared rabbit trick and get up."

"You're…" Her voice trailed off as she stared at him. Alec shifted uncomfortably and took a knee next to her. She was small, like all of the X8s. They were created with some kind of pipsqueak jungle cat DNA. He didn't know much about the X8s except that they weren't nearly as creepy as the X7s, and they had super-enhanced senses. They were trackers or something like that. He wasn't sure; Manticore hadn't exactly kept him in the know or anything.

"Yeah, I'm Manticore too. It happens," he said. He motioned to her makeshift bandage. "So, why'd you have to rip my shirt to pieces? It's not like I don't have a first-aid kit in the bathroom."

When she didn't say anything, he rolled his eyes and stood up. Bending down, he swept her up and deposited her onto the bed before she could retaliate.

"Since you've suddenly turned into a mute non-responsive, I'm gonna check on this bleeding problem of yours." While she sat there just watching him, he unwrapped the bloody, shredded t-shirt from her waist and tossed the pieces at the trashcan by the doorway. Even without close inspection, he could see that the kid's right side had caught a bullet. At least it hadn't held it.

He frowned but didn't touch the wound. "Could've been worse," he said, "What'd you do, play tag with a handgun?"

"You're X5-494."

Alec's hand stilled over her wound, and he looked at her. She was staring at her hands now, finally not trying to discover every inch of his face. She had seen his barcode so of course she knew who he was, but the way she said it… It was like she knew him.

"It's Alec," he said, "Alec McDowell, if you want to get technical. 494 just wasn't descriptive enough for some people." He gave her a smirk before turning his attention back to her side. "So, kid, who're you? Stacie? Amanda? Lacey? Wait, no, don't tell me. You're Max 2.0."

She looked up from her hands, and met his amused gaze with her eyes, eyes that were green with gold flecks. Wait…

"I'm you."


	3. Chapter 3

"Whoa, what?"

X5-494, Alec, whatever his name was now, was staring at her. His eyes bored into her as if he was seeing her for the first time, perhaps mentally cleaning the dirt smudges and grit off her face. If he did, he would see a face that looked like his, just with the smoothness of femininity and childhood.

X8-270 ducked her head again, flinching away from him. He looked so different from the last time she had seen him. She hadn't recognized him that first moment, even though her mind put the scent that was hers but wasn't and the face together. Now that he wasn't staring at the ceiling like a K.I.A. and bleeding from the beating that Manticore had given him, she could really see herself in him. An early, less-refined version of herself since he was an X5 and a male, but the familiarity of his face was both comforting and scary.

"What are you talking about?" 494 asked, his voice hard.

She flinched. Now that she had brought it up, she realized that he didn't know anything about her, and she really didn't want to talk about it. His fingers wrapped around her chin and turned her face towards him. She tried to look away, but he held her chin tightly, forcing her to look at him.

"Don't play with me, kid," he said, his identical eyes staring into hers. "What are you, some kind of clone?"

"That's stupid," she said, narrowing her eyes at the idea, "I'd be a boy."

"Then what are you?" 494 demanded. "You're the one going all dramatic and claiming to be me. So what are you?" He glared at her with suspicion darkening his eyes and raised his head. "Are you from PsyOps? Some kind of twisted joke?"

The word PsyOps took the breath out of her and filled her with cold dread instead. The metal room, the pinpoint of red light boring into her eye, the hard black restraints, the knives and needles, and that breathy, light voice in her head…

"No!" she hissed, more like an angry cat than a human. She yanked backwards and pulled herself away from him, hitting the headboard of his bed with her back. Her side burned and the fire scorched up across her torso again. In pain, she slumped onto his pillow, her body stinging like she was lying on coals. She managed to glare at him, mimicking his earlier expression even as his softened. "I'm not from _them_. Don't talk about _them_."

"Fine," he said, but he didn't seem as angry, "But I want an explanation. If that's okay with you."

She sighed and rested her hand over the bullet wound. The newly formed scab had torn open and blood warmed her hand. She considered mentioning it then decided against it in the same moment. Now that she had told him, he wanted answers. He might not even want to help her anymore.

His gaze was expectant, and his face was a frowning mask. 270 took a deep breath and buried a wince as her side hitched.

"I'm only really 87% you," she said, looking at window, "That's really not a lot, when you think about it."

Yes, it was. Except for her obvious femaleness and a few other details, they had engineered her to be as much like 494 as possible. The other 13% was tweaked to be like him, too, but it wasn't a perfect match. They had explained it to her once, back when she had been in PysOps, but she had been too frightened to take it all in.

A light rain tapped against the glass like someone wanting to get in. She had never noticed the rain when she had slept in her little bed back at Manticore; she had been too exhausted most nights to notice anything. She looked back at 494. "I'm you but not really. I'm mostly you, with a few improvements."

494 snorted. "Improvements? Like what?"

"I'm a girl," she said, tired of him snapping at her. When he cocked an eyebrow at her, she shrugged. She didn't really know all the details. "I don't know. I have better senses than you. And I'm more…" She thought about the word her handler had used to describe the X8 series. "All X8s are better at finding things than other Xs. Smarter, too." She expected him to rise to that bait, but he didn't.

"But why would they make a girly version of me?" he asked. He wasn't looking at her anymore. Instead, he was looking at his closet, shifting his gaze just like she did. "What's the point of that?"

She shrugged again. "My colonel said they were trying to see if a girl version would make up for the mistakes." She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. "It was… I'm just a test run. Expendable."

She flicked her eyes up at him, and for a moment, as the burn in her side lashed down her thigh and into her leg, he looked like he had back in Manticore, when she had seen him during his reindoctrination in PsyOps. It had been a couple years ago, but the image was seared into her brain as if they had lasered it into her memory.

His eyes staring off into nothingness, a blank expression on his ruined face. Blood dripping from his nose and across his lips. The metal doorjamb was cool under her fingers as she lingered in the doorway, too scared to go into the room until Channing shoved her in. She had wondered why no one had fixed 494, why they hadn't given him a bandage, sewn up his injuries. For the first time in her life, she had pitied someone. She learned to pity herself soon after that when she was thrust into PsyOps for the next five months while they tried to figure out if what had gone wrong with 494 was going to go wrong with her.

"Are you okay?" she asked, tilting her head to the side. She was really good at reading people, probably one of the traits she shared with him.

"Besides the fact that my Mini-Me is a girl, and she broke into my apartment to die on my bed because of poor first aid skills?" She stayed silent as he gave a hard sigh and shoved his hair back through his fingers, making it stick straight up. It looked funny. "And she's asking me if I'm all right while she's bleeding out?" He laughed darkly and looked at her. "Are you sure you're my clone?"

"Yeah. Cause I'm not a clone," she snapped, feeling testy again. She usually squashed the urge to backtalk like that, but this night had been tough on her. Her side ached, her head hurt, and she had accidentally ended up in the apartment of someone who might hate her just because a scientist had borrowed his DNA to make an experiment out of her. It wasn't like he was exactly an original either. His DNA had to be borrowed from somewhere.

She jumped when 494 chuckled. "Well, there's one thing I know that's mine."

"What?" she asked. She thought she deserved one question after answering all of his like he was her CO or handler or something.

His face changed from a suspicious glare to a quirky half-smile. "You've got my mouth."

She brought her left hand up to her face and self-consciously touched her lips. They were cracked from exposure to the cold weather but otherwise they looked exactly like his in a smaller, more delicate version. "Yeah, so?" Of course she had his mouth, she was 87% him, she'd just told him so. Watching him, she wondered just how much smarter X8s were compared to X5s.

494 snickered and stood up from the bed. "That's not exactly what I was talking about." He walked up to the top of the bed and crouched down so that their eyes were level. 270 tried not fidget as he looked at her as if trying to figure out if there was something she wasn't telling him.

Finally, he sighed and shook his head. "All right, let me take a better look at that wound, then I'm going to go call someone, ok? She'll know what to do with you."

She hesitated then nodded. What else could she do? She really didn't have a choice in the matter.

He reached toward her and then paused, his gaze lingering on her face as his hand hovered inches away from her. "Hey, kid."

"What?" Her muscles tensed, preparing for a blow. They always hit you back at Manticore when they didn't like what you did and nothing she had seen in this world seemed any different. She froze when his hand tentatively touched her arm above the wrist.

"You're not expendable anymore," he said, squeezing her arm in reassurance. It felt sorta nice. "Got it?"

Her eyes narrowed at him, thinking about how many times she had been lied to in her life, but she couldn't help but trust 494. He wasn't lying. She would know.


	4. Chapter 4

Alec didn't really know what to do with the kid, so he let his training do his thinking for him. Step One: fix the bullet wound. When he found out she was too weak to walk to the bathroom, he picked her up and carried her there. She tried to do it herself but fell over like a ragdoll before she made it to the door. Must have lost a lot of blood; there was enough of it on his comforter.

He kicked down the toilet seat cover and sat her on it. "You okay?"Her face looked white and pasty in the bright bathroom lights, but she nodded, her mouth set in a straight, pale line. Tough kid.

There was a clean wash cloth on the towel rack, so he snatched it up and ran it under the tap. He enjoyed the luxury of having a water heater thanks to Brian making sure this was the best apartment in the building. When the cloth was drenched in hot water, he turned off the sink and wrung out the cloth in the basin.

Stepping toward the kid, he crouched down beside her. He knew that Manticore had an obsession with clones, but this was too much. His hair, his eyes, his skin...on a girl? He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and reached forward to lift the edge of her t-shirt.

"Hold this," he said, and she obediently held up the tail of her shirt so he could get a good look at the wound. While she just sat there stoically staring at the opposite wall, any non-Manticore kid would have gone into shock by now. He glanced up at her dirty face. How old was she, anyway? Six, seven?

He started patting around the half-formed scab with the wash cloth, wiping away the drying blood. She tensed and leaned away from him, but he didn't snap or grab her to force her to stay still like people had done to him when he was her age. He didn't want her to think about the infirmary at Manticore or those bastards with their knives and their test drugs. Instead, he attempted to be gentle.

"So, you got a name?" he asked.

"X8-270," she replied. She fiddled with her jeans above her knees. "I have some others I use, but I don't like them."

"And you like 270?" He looked up at her with raised eyebrows, and she shrugged her thin shoulders.

"It's the one I'm used to."

"Well, I don't like it," Alec said. "You need a real name, not a designation."

"What for?" she asked, shifting her weight back and forth as he prodded the gunshot wound. She probably needed stitches, but he didn't have the instruments for that. He would have to make do with gauze and medical tape; it always worked with his injuries, and she was 87% him…somehow.

"Because…" he said, trying to think of a good reason. When he first got out of Manticore, he hadn't put a high priority on names, hell, he didn't even really care about them, but it was different now. And he didn't exactly want to go around calling her 270 or "the kid." He smirked when he thought of a mediocre, snarky answer. "Because, when Max shows up, she's going to want to name you, and I want to beat her to it."

The kid looked at him. He recognized the blank expression on her face; it was his own when he was trying to distance himself from pain. "What do you want to name me?" she deadpanned.

"You got any ideas?"

"No," she answered shortly, her eyes flashing with stubbornness for a brief second before she returned to staring at wall.

Alec snorted and stood up, tossing the bloody wash cloth into the bath tub. "All right, then, I'll think of one." He opened the drawer in the stand next to his sink and pulled out another wash cloth and a first aid kit. Closing the drawer, he stood up and balanced the first aid kit on the side of the sink while he ran the new wash cloth under the hot water. "I guess we could call you Ally, since you're my clone and everything."

"Not a clone, I told you," she said, frowning up at him. "And I don't like that name."

"You didn't have any ideas for a name, but you think you can tell me what you like and don't like?"

"It's _my_ name. And just because I'm a lot like you doesn't mean I want your name."

He rolled his eyes and handed her the clean wash cloth. "Here, wash your face. You're doing me a disservice with all that dirt on it."

Her eyes lighted up as she snatched the wash cloth out of his hands. Cat DNA tended to make you very fastidious about cleanliness, and this small fry wasn't any different from the other X series. Methodically, she started to scrub at her face, rubbing the grime off of her cheeks, nose and forehead.

While she was occupied, he kneeled down and starting working on her side. There was really no need to worry about infection; Manticore would have dealt with that on a microscopic level. However, it couldn't hurt to be careful, so he sprayed antiseptic on the wound. The girl hissed and glared at him, but he ignored her and continued working. A couple cotton pads, some medical tape and a long bandage later, the kid's side was patched up and her face and hands were pink from vigorous scouring.

Damn. She really did look like him.

Her green-gold gaze was on the bath tub, and Alec could tell that she wanted to wash off but didn't want to ask. The longing and reluctance was easy enough to see in her eyes. He would have offered her the chance, but she needed to eat and stabilize before she did anything else.

"Are you hungry?"

She shook her head. "I ate already."

"Where?" he asked, wondering how a boney little grunt like her could have found any food. It didn't look like she had eaten in a while.

"Dumpster," she answered without shame. When he stared at her, she stared back, undaunted by his disgust. "The takeout boxes are clean."

"There are better places to eat," he said, making a face as he stood up, "You know, like inside the restaurant." He put the first aid kit on top of the small white drawer he kept it in.

"I didn't have any money," she replied.

"You could've have stole some food that wasn't trash," he said, motioning for her to stand up. She grabbed the edge of the sink and pulled herself to her feet. "Or stole a wallet and bought some food."

She shrugged. "I was tired. The dumpster was easier."

"I don't care how easy it was, it's gross."

"Better than starving."

"That's your opinion," he said. He nodded his head toward the door, and she headed out with wobbly steps. At least she wasn't falling over anymore.

The girl paused at the doorway, a hesitant half-smile on her face as she looked back at him over her shoulder. "Probably yours too, then."

A snort of laughter burst out of him. "Ah, so you've got jokes. Great."

She ignored him and walked into his living room, her weak legs starting to tremble. He pointed to the white couch and stepped into the kitchen, knowing the kid would obey him. Since she was Manticore, she would most likely obey anyone with a higher rank; a few months in the real world wasn't enough to erase that kind of intense training.

There wasn't much in his fridge besides booze and a couple packs of rotten bologna. He almost always ate out, so there wasn't much of a need to keep the fridge well-stocked. After rummaging around the shelves, he found an old take-out box from a diner across the street.

Huh, well, he knew she didn't mind leftovers from her recount of dumpster escapades, so he grabbed a plate from the cabinet and put a pair of cold fried chicken legs on it. She may not feel hungry, but she still needed to eat; it'd help her replenish her blood supply faster. And Max might be happier with him if he fed her. For good measure, he grabbed a handful of cookies from a half-eaten box of them that was on the counter and put them on the plate.

"Hope you like fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies," he said, walking into the living room, "Not the healthiest choices, but it's better than your usual dining selection. It hasn't been in a trash can."

The kid was lying against the arm of the couch, her arms around one of the big grey pillows. Her head nodded forward, and Alec snapped his fingers, causing her to jerk awake. He couldn't have her falling asleep just yet. She needed to get some food into her system. "Hey, wake up, nameless. I slaved in front of the stove for hours on this, so you better eat it." He set the plate down on the end of the coffee table that was within her reach.

"I don't always eat out of dumpsters," she said as she sat up. She looked at the plate for a second before picking up one of the cookies. It seemed like the junk food tooth ran in the family. Good to know.

"What, you visit the landfills too?"

"No." She nibbled on the cookie and looked at him with her wide hazel eyes that were identical to his. That was so weird. "The sewers are full of big rats. They're okay if you roast them first."

He stared at her, thoroughly grossed out until he realized she was kidding. He gave a strained chuckle and flopped down in his favorite chair, the big, plush red one. "You're sort of clever. They ever tell you that?"

She shook her head and munched on the cookie while hugging the pillow with one arm. Aw, damn, she looked as cute and innocent as kicked puppy when she did that. If it had been a teddy bear instead of a pillow and if her short hair had been up in pigtails, she would have been a picture perfect version of a real kid. He had to grin at her. "How many people did you con out of their dinner?"

"I didn't con anyone, they just gave me food," she said. She finished the first cookie and picked up another one. "I didn't ask for it neither."

"No, all you had to do was look at it, and they handed it to you," Alec said. He leaned back and watched her pick at the food. It was like watching a distorted mirror, an alternate life that he had never dreamed about or expected. But now that life was sitting on his couch, eating a chocolate chip cookie while her eyelids threatened to drop shut out of exhaustion and blood loss.

The girl was like him but not him. He drummed his fingers across his knees and glanced at the bookshelves behind the couch. She was right: she couldn't have his name, but he still thought she needed one like it. A slow smile came to his face along with the perfect name. Well, not really a name, but it suited the kid, and he thought she might like it.

"Quip."

"Huh?" She raised her head to look at him, curious.

"What do you think of that?" He leaned forward and grinned at her.

"Of what?" she asked, watching him with suspicion. He snatched one of the remaining cookies from the plate and took a big bite out of it.

"Of your new name. Quip." He grinned. "Max'll probably hate it, but I think it's good. Better than Fixit. Or Bullet." He stuffed the rest of cookie into his mouth and talked around it. "But what do I know? It's your name. You like it?"

She blinked and squeezed the pillow tighter. "I get to decide?"

"Yeah, I'm not going to just stick a label on you. That's Max's deal." He rubbed the crumbs off on his pants leg and stood up. His cell phone was in his messenger bag, and he needed to tell Max about this, er, new development. "Look, finish the chicken and think about the name. I've got to go call Max." He saw the brief panicked look in her eyes and added, "She's Manticore, too, or at least they made her."

She jerked her head in a short nod and pulled her legs up onto the couch. A stern expression slipped over her face to cover the inevitable grimace as the motion aggravated her wound.

Alec retrieved his cell phone from his messenger bag and dialed Max's number. For him, it was faster than looking it up in the phonebook application.

Max answered exactly four and a half seconds after the phone started ringing. _"You better be sick or dying."_

"I'll do you one better," he said. "How about genetically altered into a six-year-old girl?"

Max let out a bark of sarcastic laughter. _"What the hell, Alec? I always knew you were insane, but this-"_

Then kid piped up. "I think I'm seven." Alec knew Max could hear her over the cell phone. X5 hearing was something to be feared.

There was a long pause and then Max said, very slowly, _"Start talking."_


	5. Chapter 5

270 dozed on the couch, drifting into sleep and then waking herself up to look at 494 or glance at the TV he had turned on claiming that if she was going to snooze, he was at least going to do something productive. She didn't think that watching TV counted as productive, especially when all he did was watch music videos.

She rolled the name he had proposed around in her head, playing with it and trying to see if it fit her. Back at Manticore, they hadn't been allowed to call soldiers anything other than their designation. Names were strictly against the rules, and besides, only betrayers and runaways had names. But wasn't she a runaway now, sort of?

Playing with the corner of the pillow, 270 flicked her eyes toward 494. He was so…different. Of course he couldn't be the broken down soldier she saw in Isolation, but this man sitting in the red chair watching poorly-made music videos, he wasn't Manticore. Yes, he had a barcode, but he didn't act like Manticore had owned him for his entire life, had trained him into a killing machine. He even had a name now, one that he preferred over his designation. But designations were good, and names were bad. Only betrayers and runaways had names… 270 closed her eyes and buried her face into the pillow. Why was everything so difficult in this world?

When she woke up again, her side aching, she realized that there was another scent in the room besides hers and 494's. It was a warm scent, like oranges, cinnamon and daylilies, all delicately mixed together with an odd overlay of the smell of motor oil and hot water. Another person, the Max person, must have come in while she was sleeping. 270 kept her eyes closed and tried to evaluate the situation by listening to them talk.

"…chicken and cookies! She's an injured little girl, you ass, you can't just feed her junk like that."

"She eats out of dumpsters. I don't think this stuff's going to hurt her." Someone picked up the plate near her head and walked away, heading toward the kitchen. The other, lighter pair of footsteps, which 270 guessed belonged to Max, followed 494 into the kitchen. The plate clanked against the other dirty dishes in the sink.

"Look, I called Logan before coming over here," the female voice said. "He thinks he can call in a favor and get someone to take her up to Canada next week. That'll give her time to heal up before she goes." There was a pause and then a quiet sigh. "Poor kid."

"Where's she going to go when she gets up there?"

"Logan says he might be able to track down Bullet and the others. She could stay with them."

"Huh. That's great."

"Hey, at least she'll be with someone. They'll take care of her."

"Those kids are probably living in a shack and making meals out of pork rinds and honey buns," 494 said. "Can't your boyfriend find her a family to live with or something?"

"He's not my boyfriend," the Max woman hissed, "And no one's really jumping at the chance to take in a transgenic kid right now."

"What about that farm your brother's at?"

"Are you serious?!" She sounded mad, and 270 picked up on the twinge of pain in her voice.

494's reply sounded like he was sorry for suggesting it but still thought it was a good idea. "Yeah, well, they already took him in, and she'd help out around the farm too, I guess. She'd probably like it there."

"Alec, they're already in danger since Zack's there," Max said. "They can't take her in too. Besides, if Zack saw her barcode, something might click in his head, and he'll come after Logan again."

"I thought he wanted to be with you, not Super Savior," said 494.

"Don't call him names," the woman said, "And don't talk about things you don't know anything about."

"Chill, Max. I'm just saying that they're already putting their necks out, so they shouldn't mind taking on the kid too. From what you've told me about him, Zack would like something Manticore-made to protect anyway."

"I just want Zack to take care of himself. She'll be fine with the others in Canada."

"Yeah, if you like living on a frozen tundra."

There was the distinctive sound of someone being hit in the head, and 494 let out a whine. "Ow, is that your answer to everything I say?"

"Pretty much."

270 instinctively froze. Her heart pounded. It wasn't like she wasn't used to violence, but she had thought she was done with being hit by people when Manticore went down. Were the two of them going to hit her now? She was pretty sure that 494 wouldn't, but she didn't know about this Max person.

She opened her eyes. Going through the windows would be too much of a hassle, but he door was still partly open from where she had broken the lock. If she blurred, she might make it to the door and down the hall before they noticed she was missing. Her side burned to remind her that she was injured, but she ignored the pain. Maybe she would come back after the woman was gone. Or not. Didn't really matter.

While 494 and the woman bickered, 270 took her chance. Swinging her legs around, she slid off the couch and made a break for the door. Pain swarmed across her abdomen from her wound, and her vision swam. Damn, worse than she thought. She was three feet away when she heard footsteps behind her. A hand landed on the door, closing it, as 494 stepped in front of her.

"You might want to put your shoes on before leaving," he said, crossing his arms over his chest. "And saying goodbye to your host is supposedly good manners, too."

270 looked up at him, her legs shaking. Her side stung like someone was dripping acid into it, and she hated feeling like she was trapped. "Then give me my shoes."

"You don't have to be afraid. You're safe now." The Max woman's voice was kind, now, sort of soft, as she walked out of the kitchen. She was pretty, with long dark hair, longer than anyone's hair at Manticore, and she had big brown eyes. 270 wasn't buying it. There had been that lab assistant once, the one with the long blond hair, and she had been nice. Until she injected 270 with poison to see how her X8 body would handle it.

"I just wanna go," 270 said, backing toward the door. She ran into 494's legs, and he put his hands on her shoulders.

"Come on, pipsqueak," he said, "Max doesn't bite." He tossed a smirk at the woman. "At least not kids."

"Oh, shut up," the woman, Max, said, putting her hands on her hips. She stared at 270, looking from her face to 494's, her eyes narrowing. "It's crazy how much she looks like you. Except way cuter."

"Gee, thanks," 494 said. "Good to know my looks can be improved on."

Max ignored the comment and took another step closer. "Look, we're going to take care of you, I promise. You don't have to be a soldier anymore."

"I can take care of myself," 270 said, shaking her head. She didn't need them to take care of her. She had been fine on her own for the past few months; she was doing good besides this one mistake. "I wanna go, I'll be fine."

"Remind you of anyone?" Max said, flicking her eyes up at 494.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," 494 replied. Before 270 could move again, he picked her up. She squirmed, trying to get out of his arms, but the violent twisting aggravated her wound.

Surrendering for the moment, she put her arms around 494's neck and hoped he wouldn't suddenly drop her like they did at Manticore. The scientists liked to see how fast the X8s could react, if they could land on their feet. Of course, they usually dropped them a couple stories, not a couple feet, but you never knew. 494 headed toward the couch and put her down gently, like he actually cared about if he hurt her or not. She watched him as he stepped back and turned toward Max who had followed them.

"What's wrong with her?" Max asked as she sat down on the arm of the chair.

"Maybe she doesn't like being referred to in the third person when she's sitting right there," 494 said. When Max glared at him, he shrugged. "I don't know, I think you freaked her out."

"I didn't do anything," Max said, frowning.

"You can come on sort of strong, Max," 494 said.

Max looked over at 270, and her glare softened. "I didn't mean to scare you. I just want to make sure you're okay."

"You didn't scare me," 270 said, frowning. She pulled the big pillow back into her lap and hugged it to her. "And I'm good. I've been taking care of myself. It ain't so bad."

"So little home girl's been picking up some slang from the outside," Max said, smiling at 270, "Did you pick up a name, too?"

270 blinked and pulled back into the couch. Did she have a name? A moment's hesitation passed as she thought of everything she had called herself, all those phone book names, and her designation. Her designation, those numbers tattooed to the back of her neck, that was who she was…or was it who she had been? She didn't know anymore, not after tonight. She looked at Max and bit her bottom lip, trying to decide what to say.

"Quip," she finally answered, flicking her eyes up at 494…Alec. "My name's Quip."


	6. Chapter 6

Alec watched as Max tried to get the kid to open up to her, but with every question Max asked, Quip retreated further into herself, giving monosyllable answers for complex questions like "Where have you been living?" and "Has anyone noticed your barcode?" He knew Max was on a guilt-trip right now, he could see it in the lines on her face, but pumping the kid for information about just how much her life had sucked since Manticore wasn't going to make Max or the kid feel better.

When the kid...Quip's head started to droop toward the pillow, Alec tossed a smirk at Max. "Hey, how about you continue the inquisition tomorrow? She'll probably be more up to it when she's had a few hours sleep."

"What time is it?"

"I dunno." Alec glanced at the clock on the wall. "Four in the morning."

"Oh." Max blinked and pulled her shoulders back, half-embarrassed. "I didn't know…"

"Yeah, must be nice to be infused with shark DNA, but some of us have to sleep," he said, nodding toward his exhausted not-a-clone. Quip sat up straight when they looked at her, but her eyelids were closing even as she struggled to keep them open. Alec rolled his eyes at her. Stubborn.

"I'll ask Logan if he can get her an appointment with his doctor tomorrow, so he can check her out and stitch her up," Max said as she slid out of the chair she had been sitting in. "I can take her by in the morning. You and O.C. can cover me at work." She held her hand out to the girl. "You ready to go, kiddo?"

"Whoa, where's she going?" Alec asked, standing up. He flicked his eyes from Max to the kid. "And she doesn't need a doctor."

Max turned toward him, one hand on her hip. "Yes, she does. And you didn't think she was going to stay here, did you?"

"Well, yeah, sorta," Alec said. He glanced at the kid and noticed how she had sunk into the couch, pulling the pillow over her like a shield. Only her wide green-gold eyes peeked over the top of the pillow, and they stared at Max with apprehension. Maybe Max with her ten year head start had forgotten what it was like to be right out of Manticore and away from the doctors' scalpels, but this kid hadn't. "What're you going to do, stick her on the back of your bike and let her freeze all the way back to your place?"

"No," Max retorted, "I'll use one of your jackets."

Women. They always thought they could walk off with your clothes. "I don't think you should be driving off with her on a bike when she's got a bullet hole in her."

"I thought you said she didn't need a doctor." Max crossed her arms and looked at him expectantly, as if she didn't think he could up with a comeback for that.

Alec rubbed his hand across his face and frowned at Max. She was always so damn difficult; was that some kind of side effect from living on the outside too long? "Look, I'm just saying that she probably doesn't want to go to a doctor. I mean, I couldn't imagine why not with all her happy, fun-times memories about them and everything."

"I know, I know," Max said, "But she's still hurt-"

"And she'll heal," Alec replied, "It's what we're built to do. And it's not going to kill her."

"What, you're an X8 expert now?" Max asked, cocking her head to the side and glaring at him. It seemed like Alec could never do anything right when it came to Max.

"No, but I've seen more bullet wounds in transgenics than you have," Alec retorted.

"I'll be fine," Quip put in, her voice soft and tired but insistent. She raised her head from the pillow and looked up at the two older transgenics. "Can I go now?"

Alec snorted at her determination. "Where're you going to go, small fry? Got a cardboard box somewhere?"

"Yeah, over in Sector Twelve," Quip replied just as quickly. She frowned up at him. "I've got places."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Max said before Alec could say anything, "It's dangerous for you to be out there alone."

"I've been alone since Manticore," Quip said. Her eyes drifted to the floor. "I'll be okay."

"Where's your unit?" Max asked gently. Alec watched the kid's face, unwilling to ask her any questions that would bring up bad memories. She clutched at the pillow and shook her head almost imperceptibly. She didn't want to talk about it.

Max's expression softened as she saw the same reluctance Alec had seen. She knelt down in front of the couch and carefully pulled the pillow away from Quip's face. "This has got to be sort of scary for you, but it's going to be okay. You don't have to worry about looking out for yourself anymore. You've got friends. Family."

Max and her family. Alec scowled. They were all just one big happy family, all of the Manticore freaks. Shit, Max, just go buy us a big white house with a white picket fence, and we'll all live happily ever after like Cinderella and her damn talking mice. Because we're not designed for warfare or built to serve without question or made to kill or anything like that, and we're going to love each other like every other good old American family. Isn't that right, Max?

The kid fidgeted and flicked her eyes up at him. He recognized the look. Too tired to protest, too determined to not agree. And too afraid to talk back to Max, tell her what she really thought.

"What if she spends the night here?" Alec said, "She's looks like she's going to fall out. She can go to your place tomorrow."

"Why doesn't anyone listen to me?" Quip asked, glaring up at both of them. "I just wanna go."

"Not an option," Max said, taking on that commanding, no-nonsense voice. "You're injured and in no condition to be out roaming the streets." Hesitantly, she glanced over at Alec. "If I leave her here, you're not going to put her out after I'm gone, right?"

"Damn, Max, you caught me. Here I was, planning to drop her at the pound," Alec replied sarcastically. "I'm self-preserving, not heartless."

Max shrugged as she stood up. "Seems like the same thing to me a lot of the time."

Oo-ooo, woman. Alec clenched and unclenched his fist but kept his easy-going smile. Max just loved seeing how far she could push him. "Sorry it confuses you."

"No biggie," Max replied. She looked back down at Quip. "You sure you're okay staying with this guy?"

Quip grabbed the pillow and yanked it back to her. "If I have to stay anywhere, yeah. I guess so."

Alec smirked. The kid was going to try to make a run for it, he knew that. If she was anything like him, and her face and attitude pointed to that being true, she would consider this an uncertain situation, one that she didn't particularly like since people were trying to decide things for her. She would bolt at the first possible chance, like she had already tried to do. Smart kid, but now wasn't the time to be playing Escape-and-Evade. With Familiars and suits out there trying to smoke every transgenic they found, she didn't need to be out roving the streets with that pretty barcode of hers.

Max whipped a frown at Alec. "If you hurt her…"

"Hey, I wasn't the one who shot her," Alec said, holding up his hands. "She'll sleep, I'll sleep, and then you'll storm in in the morning, and it's your show again. No senseless beating of the kid involved."

She stared at him for a moment before glancing at Quip. "Get some sleep, all right? I'll be back in the morning." Max walked over to the door and then banged the heel of her hand against the doorjamb. "And get your door fixed, you bum."

"At least my apartment building doesn't have rats," he called after her as she walked out, closing the broken door behind her.

When he was sure Max was gone and wasn't going to come back just to make some other scathing remark about his bachelor's lifestyle, Alec turned toward the couch. "Come on, kid, you can have my bed…"

Asleep. Or at least she looked like it was with her hands folded and cushioning her head as she lay on top of the pillow. Too bad for her, he was trained to see the tiny differences between awake and sleeping, but he could tell she was trying her damndest to fake it.

"Fine, have it your way," he said, shrugging. Max would probably, no, definitely kill him if the kid was gone in the morning, but who was he to tell her where she could and couldn't go?

The kid had been on her own since September; if she had made it this long, it was likely that she'd survive on her own, and she seemed determined to go. If he was her…and in a weird, twisted sense he didn't quite get yet, he sort of was…he'd want the same option.

Alec pulled the grey blanket off the back of the couch and draped it over her. It was much too big for her, and part of it pooled on the floor, so he tucked it into the crease of the couch, trying to make sure that if she did decide to spend the night for some unknown reason, she wouldn't have to worry about her blanket sliding off.

The kid had probably spent the last seven months living in the penniless slums of Seattle and staying away from cops, government agents and the Familiars, everyone on her tail because of who and what she was. And that wasn't mentioning the regular scummy whackos in the city. She'd dealt with all that shit, all by herself, while trying to find a way to make it in a world she knew absolutely nothing about.

The least he could do was make sure her blanket didn't fall off during the night.

"You know, I've got waffles and lots of black market maple syrup and butter and chocolate milk for breakfast tomorrow morning," he said, knowing she was listening, "and you probably don't eat all that much, since you're such a tiny punk." He reached down involuntarily and smoothed the large wrinkle out of blanket over her shoulder. Damn, had he ever been that small? "I might have some extra, if you want to stay."

She didn't say anything. Not that he expected her to. Being 87% him probably went a long way.

Alec headed toward his bedroom, kicking Quip's ratty shoes out of the way as he sat down on his bed. He glanced back out into the living room. Huh, not gone yet. Of course, that would've been impressive if she had gotten out of the room in the eight seconds he had had his back turned to her. Maybe she'd be there in the morning, maybe she wouldn't be. Waffles would have worked on him, but maybe she didn't have that waffle-loving gene. Or know what a waffle was. He'd show her in the morning.


	7. Chapter 7

Waffles covered in maple syrup and melting butter were actually really, really good. Or at least the ones that 494 didn't burn were good. No…Alec, not 494. Trying to use names instead of designations when it came to Manticore soldiers wasn't exactly easy for 270…Quip. Her name was Quip now.

After 49—Alec had gone to bed, Quip had stayed up, trying to decide whether or not to make a break for it and go to ground. She didn't like not being in control of the situation, and she really didn't like that Max was trying to ship her off to Canada or something. Seattle was her home base, and Seattle was where she belonged now that there was no more Manticore. Eventually she drifted to sleep, her exhausted body making the choice for her.

She had woken up to the smell of something delicious cooking and the sound of Alec humming and mumbling words from some song she'd never heard before. Before she had time to think about sneaking out before he noticed her, he came out of the kitchen with a huge plate of yellow-gold, bread-looking things and a jug of chocolate milk.

Alec set two mismatched plates and a pair of cups down on the table. Glancing at her before sitting down, he pulled five of the golden pieces of bread (she guessed these were the waffles he had mentioned last night) onto the plate in front of him and poured thick, golden-brown syrup over them.

Tentatively, she got off the couch and joined him, pilfering one of the waffles from the stack and moving it to a smaller plate that he had put across from his place at the table. Without asking for permission, she doused her waffle with syrup; it was already covered in butter.

Alec scarfed down most of the waffles while Quip picked at hers. They were pretty delicious, but she wasn't used to eating lots of sweet things; she mostly looked for nutritional food when she was out on the streets. But she decided that chocolate milk was pretty much the best thing ever.

"So," Alec said, breaking the silence as he leaned back in his chair, "About this hospital thing."

Quip wondered how hard it would be to sink into the floor and disappear. Hospital. The regular person word for med-bay or infirmary. Or lab. Her side was still aching, but it wasn't as bad as yesterday, or she didn't think so. Not bad enough for her to have to go to a hospital, if anything. "I don't need to go."

"Hey, maybe the guy will give you a lollipop or something," Alec said, smirking at her. Quip frowned.

"I feel good, my side doesn't hurt that bad," she said, shaking her head. She didn't care about candy. This guy was a doctor. So he was bad. 'Bad' and 'doctor' were the same thing back at Manticore; why would it be any different out here?

"Yeah, sure it doesn't," Alec said. He speared one of his remaining waffles and lifted it. Syrup dripped from the waffle onto the plate below and pooled in a golden-brown circle. "Because being shot is like spending a day at the spa. Feels good, right?"

"Haha," Quip said stubbornly, glaring down at the gooey remains of her waffle. "You wouldn't go either," she muttered.

"Maybe I would," Alec replied, "You're the one who keeps insisting you're not really a clone. Maybe we don't do everything alike."

"We don't, but this we do," she said. She stared at him as he stared at her, green-gold versus green-gold. Eventually she broke and stabbed at her waffles. Darn him. "I don't want to go."

Alec snickered. "You're right. I wouldn't want to go either. But I would've gone at your age."

"That's because you were at Manticore." She smirked at him, mimicking the way the corner of his mouth rose. "You couldn't say no."

"So you're going to say no just because you can?" Alec asked, one eyebrow rising. "Hurting yourself is an interesting way of showing your independence."

"I didn't hurt myself," she said. She wasn't sure whether or not she should tell him about the men or not. They probably knew she had overheard them talking, but it wasn't like they were going to find her or anything, and Alec couldn't do anything about it. Besides, if she told him, that might make him want to send her to Canada too. Nope, it was better not to tell him.

"That's another thing that's on my mind," Alec said, "How exactly did you end up with a gunshot wound? Get on the wrong side of a turf fight? Cross-fire between unfriendlies? Drive-by?"

"No, no and no." She nibbled at a piece of waffle and glared at the wall. It was annoying how adults always ask so many questions. Wasn't one question good enough?

"Oh, so the hole in your side appeared out of nowhere?"

"Yep."

Alec waved his fork around in a circle and said in a sing-song voice, "Someone's lying," before popping the chunk of waffle into his mouth.

"I got shot," Quip said with a defensive shrug. "Why does it matter how it happened?"

"Because. People usually don't get shot for no reason," Alec said. He lifted both of his eyebrows and got a quirky expression on his face. "Unless it was the drive-by option, and then you should have moved out of the way."

"It _wasn't_ ," Quip insisted, hating the childish whine she was making by drawing out the 'wasn't.'

"Fine," Alec said, "But Max is going to ask you too. Because it does matter."

"Whatever," Quip said. She fixed her eyes on her plate and refused to look up at him.

They ate in silent for a few minutes, Alec swigging down large amounts of chocolate milk in-between stuffing waffles into his mouth. A tiny smile drifted onto her face as she watched her older, lanky male counterpart put away an abnormal amount of food. Maybe X5s needed to eat a lot. Or maybe he just really liked waffles.

"What if I went with you?"

Quip lifted her head and blinked at him. "But you don't want to go."

Alec sighed and grabbed his glass of milk. "No, I don't, but if I go, will you go?" He chugged the rest of his glass and then set it down, keeping his eyes on hers.

She narrowed her eyes, wondering if this was some kind of trick. "Maybe. Why are you coming?"

"Curiosity," he said, grinning, "I want to see how many stitches he'll put in you."

"That's not funny," she replied. She made a face at him when he smirked at her. "I don't want stitches."

"Then you shouldn't go around letting mysterious bullet holes appear in your side," Alec told her. "Besides, if I go, I can keep Max from harassing you."

Quip played with the edge of the table, running her fingers along the smooth, cool metal trimming. She flicked her gaze up at him. "I don't need you to come."

"I know," Alec said, "But I don't really want to go to work today, and this is a good excuse, isn't it?" He smirked at her as he skittered his fork across his empty plate. "My little sister's hurt, and she really needs me to be with her. Normal will definitely buy that."

Quip bit the inside of her cheek. Maybe having him along with her wouldn't be such a bad thing. If all else failed, maybe he would distract Max and the doctor, and she could make a break for it while they weren't paying attention. "Okay…I guess you can come."

"Glad to know I have the permission of a six-year-old."

"I'm seven," she declared.

Alec only grinned back at her.

Someone knocked on the door, and it swung open since the lock was still broken, revealing Max and some guy who smelled like motor oil, electronics, and paper and didn't smell like a transgenic. At all.

Quip gripped her fork and looked at Alec, ready to run, but he smiled back at her, somehow knowing exactly what she was thinking. "That's just Logan. Really, nothing to worry about."

"Glad to know I'm so respected," Logan said, rolling his eyes. He looked over at Quip and smiled at her. She could tell by the way his eyebrows knit together and how he glanced from her to Alec that he was comparing them, looking at their noticeable similarities. "Hey there."

Quip stared at him, not saying a word. When it came to regular people, she was usually friendly since if she was nice to them, they usually gave her something to eat or a place to stay for the night, but this guy…he seemed okay, but maybe Alec and the Max woman really were going to get rid of her, send her to Canada like they had talked about last night. Quip didn't want to go to Canada.

"She's definitely got your manners, Alec," Max said.

Logan shrugged and gave a crooked smile. "It's okay. I'm not really all that good with kids."

"Never would've guessed that," Alec said. He sounded serious, but Quip didn't think he was. And from the looks on Max and Logan's faces, they didn't think he meant it either.

"Anyways," Max said, tossing a frown at Alec, "Logan's going to drive us over to Sam's hospital, if Quip's willing to go."

Quip snuck a pointed look at Alec. He had to go with her or she wasn't going at all. Not that she needed him there or anything. But if they were going to make her to go to a hospital, then he had to go too.

"Sam won't hurt you," Logan said, probably noticing the look she was giving Alec, "He's worked on other transgenics." Quip's nose scrunched up. He made it sound like transgenics were carburetors or something.

"He's been my doctor before," Max added, "He's pretty awesome."

"You know," Alec said, "maybe Manticore girls have a thing for getting shot." He looked over at Quip, gold-green eyes amused. "Do you just get a kick out of it or something?"

Quip rolled her eyes at him. "Yeah, I like getting shot. It's fun."

"Alec, shut up," Max said, frowning at Alec. She looked back at Quip. "It won't take long, I promise. We can go get you some new clothes or something afterwards."

"I already tried to buy her off with candy," Alec said, "Doesn't work."

"I'm not trying to buy you off," Max said to Quip while tossing a glare at Alec. "I just thought you'd like new clothes."

Quip tugged at her black t-shirt. Her clothes were a little worn out; the hem of the t-shirt was ragged and her jeans had holes in them. Not to mention her shoes. Her shoes looked awful. "I don't have any money."

"Just give them a cute pouty look," Alec said. He winked at her as he stood up from the table. "They'll throw free clothes at you."

"Interesting concept," the Logan guy said, "Does that usually work for you?"

A small grin slipped onto Quip's face at the thought of Alec trying to pout the store assistants into giving him clothes. Alec smirked back at the regular.

"Actually, they usually try to rip my clothes off instead of putting more on."

"Ugh, Alec, you're so full of it," Max said, tossing her head.

"Just telling the truth, Max," he said with an innocent shrug.

Max gave him a disgusted look before turning back to Quip. "You'll feel better faster if you go."

Quip sighed as she slid out of her chair. "Fine. I'll go. But I won't like it. And I still don't want to go."

"That's the spirit," Alec said. He grinned at her before he walked over to his bedroom. Quip stared after him, not really wanting to talk to Max or Logan, until he came back. He was carrying her shoes and two jackets, one black leather one and a blue denim one.

"Here, midget," he said, handing the shoes and the blue denim jacket to Quip, "It'll at least keep you warm even if you drown in it."

"Thanks," Quip mumbled. She laid the jacket on her chair as she sat down on the floor to put her shoes on. Her side ached, but she tried not to let it show on her face. Above her, Alec put on the black leather jacket and then turned back to Max.

"So, how far away is this guy's place?" he asked, playing with the collar of his jacket.

"Not far," Logan said, "It's only a couple sectors away."

"Guess we'll make it back to work by afternoon, right, Max?" Alec said. He smiled at Max who only stared back at him.

"I'll make it back to work. You're going to work in the first place."

"Nah, I thought I'd tag along and see the hospital," he said, "See, I'm viewing this as a learning experience."

"You're going to case the place, aren't you?" Max accused, her dark eyes narrowed into almond slits.

Alec shook his head. "No, just curious. I've got cat in my DNA too, remember?"

"Tom cat, yeah."

"Haha."

When Quip was finished lacing her sneakers, she stood up, biting her bottom lip so she wouldn't grimace too much. Her side burned for pain for a moment, but Alec discreetly grabbed her arm and pulled her upright, masking the movement by grabbing for the denim jacket. Their eyes met for a second, and Alec squeezed her arm as she leaned against his side until the pain dulled again and she could step away.

"He can come, Max," Logan said. He shrugged and gave a peacemaker's smile. "The more the merrier, right?" Quip didn't think he sounded very enthusiastic, and the looks he and Alec exchanged didn't seem all that friendly. It seemed to make Max back down though.

"Don't do anything stupid," she said. She frowned at Alec. "I'm keeping an eye on you."

"I'll be an angel," Alec said. He looked down at Quip. "Ready to go?"

She nodded, and they all headed toward the door, Quip hovering around Alec's elbow. She didn't want him to go right now, but she definitely didn't need him. Nope.


	8. Chapter 8

Alec thought the kid looked freaked out when they reached a staff entrance on the back side of the hospital. Logan had said that the guy wanted to meet them at this entrance since if they came in the normal way, they would have to check in if they wanted to get past the waiting area.

While Logan reached forward to push the door open, Quip stepped backward and slipped halfway behind Alec's legs. He glanced down at her and caught her staring wide-eyed into the building as Logan pushed the door open, revealing the stereotypical white hallways and chrome fixtures. Seriously, couldn't they switch up their color scheme a little? Alec smirked. Maybe Joshua's love for abstract colors was rubbing off on him.

"Come on, squirt," he said, reaching back and nudging Quip forward when she hesitated. "It's just a door."

She flashed a frown up at him but pressed against his right leg as they stepped through the doorway and into the hospital. He didn't blame her. Places like this gave him the creeps, too, and brought up bad memories that he didn't want to experience again. Blue-tiled hallways, bare rooms, red lasers, syringes, saws, drills, scalpels, masked faces…

Violently, he flung the thoughts back into the recesses of his memory and focused on the present. Why was he here again? The warm little shape that seemed glued to his side. That's why. Oh, and there was a cute nurse, redhead, leaning against the wall with a clipboard in hand. Long fingers, long hair, long legs. Damn, he liked redheads. And brunettes. And blondes.

He felt someone staring at him, and he turned his head to see Max watching him. "What're you grinning about?" she asked, her arms crossed over her chest.

"Nothing." Ms. Redhead would probably like some nice guy to talk to. She looked bored. And hot.

"Mmhmm. Sure," Max replied. "I swear, Alec, if you steal something from here, I will hunt you down and make you pay it back. And extra."

"Will that be a payment in money or pain?" he asked, "'cause it matters, you know."

"You're impossible," Max said, shaking her head.

Alec was about to retort when Quip's weight suddenly disappeared from his side. He glanced down and caught sight of the heel of one sneaker zipping around the corner of a nearby counter that framed a small reception area. He quirked up an eyebrow and looked down the hallway to see Logan standing beside a man with a receding hairline who was wearing a lab coat. The metal name plate on it said Dr. Carr.

Oh. No wonder the kid was playing Escape-and-Evade.

Sighing, Alec walked over to the counter. He smiled at the doughty, middle-aged woman who was sitting behind a computer, her hand wrapped around a ceramic coffee mug. "Sorry to bother you, but you don't happen to see a kid back there, do you?"

The woman looked up at him, and her eyes lighted up with appreciation as she took in his Manticore-crafted, Sandeman-approved face. "Sorry, honey, but I'm not sure…"

"My little sister seems to have disappeared on me," he said. He picked up a pen that was laying on the counter and put it back in a cup with other pens and pencils before he looked at her again with that disarming smile he knew so well how to use. "She doesn't really like hospitals, and she's a little nervous about being here, so I think she hid back there when I wasn't looking. Maybe she was looking for her teddy bear."

There was a quiet, irritated growl, but he still heard it. He nodded to the floor-level cabinets that were behind the woman. "Maybe if you check in those. She likes small spaces."

"Oh, sweetheart, I don't think she'll be there," the woman said even as she turned her swivel chair around, "And I would have heard her…but I'll take a look."

She reached for the handle of the cabinet, but when she touched it, the cabinet next to it popped open. She let out a squeak as Quip slipped out of the tiny space like a contortionist coming out of a box.

The woman put her hand over her mouth and stared at Quip as the kid skittered back toward the entrance to the desk area. "Goodness! How did you fit in there?"

"She's part sponge," Alec teased as he walked over to where Quip was headed, "So she's wonderfully springy."

Quip flashed a glare up at him but didn't say anything as the woman tittered with laughter. "Well, she's positively adorable."

"Thanks," Alec said, "But don't let her fool you. She's a handful." He watched Quip as she lingered in the entrance, letting the counter hide her. Three sets of footsteps approached, and Alec turned his head to see Logan, Max and the Sam guy approach.

The balding doctor stepped up to the counter and rested his elbows on it as he talked to the woman. "Kelly, I'm going to take these guys to Room 6, all right? It won't take long."

She nodded and scribbled something down on a pad of paper near her right hand. "Got it, Sam." She pointed her pencil over at the place where Quip was attempting to hide. "Is she your patient?"

"Not sure, haven't seen her yet," the doctor replied. He glanced over at Alec with a likeable-guy smile on his face. Alec had to struggle to not lower his eyes. Manticore indoctrination courses drilled it into your head that you were supposed to completely obey authority figures, and according to the vids, doctors and scientists were at the top of the hierarchy or authority.

"This is Alec," Max said, jerking her head toward him.

"What, can't I introduce myself anymore?" Alec said. He rolled his eyes as she shoved him in the shoulder. Pushy, both in the physical and verbal sense.

"Well, before she introduces me, I'm Sam Carr," the doctor said, extending his hand toward Alec. Alec glanced at the outstretched hand and then shook it, gripping a little harder than necessary.

"Hey," he said, for once not really knowing what else to say. At least this guy didn't see like one of the mad scientist types. Of course, sometimes they didn't look like they were…

"So," Sam said, looking over at the edge of the counter, "Where's Quip?"

"Around," Alec said. He looked down the kid and lifted his eyebrows. She had come this far, she might as well go the rest of the way. She clung to the edge of the counter and looked very unwilling to move.

"Ah," Sam said, nodding at Alec, "You guys really don't like hospitals, do you?"

Alec smirked and shook his head. "That's sort of an understatement."

Max slipped around Alex and Logan and bent down at the entrance to the reception area. "Hey, Quip, are you ready? Sam's a good guy, and he's not going to hurt you. I promise."

Alec frowned. Maybe Quip would actually pay attention to what Max said if Max stopped treating her like a normal kid and acknowledge that she was an X8. He had heard back in Manticore that X8s all had genius IQ around 200, give or take a few points. Just because Quip was seven didn't mean she wasn't completely capable of comprehending the situation.

Most likely she wasn't responding because her training was telling her to wait for orders. Manticore had made very sure that the last few generations of X-series obeyed every direction given to them by scientists and doctors.

Stepping around Max, Alec picked up Quip, who was staring down at the floor like she was considering punching a hole through it and escaping. As he lifted her, Quip froze as if she was some kind of porcelain doll in an oversized denim jacket.

After a second's hesitation, Alec turned around so the doctor could see the kid. "Sam Carr, Quip. Quip, Sam Carr. Everyone good?" Without waiting for a response, he headed off down the hallway, looking for Room 6. They didn't need to drag this out any longer than they needed to.

He found Room 6 and let himself in. It was a standard exam room, but it looked less imposing than a normal Manticore med-lab. At least there were no surgical instruments sitting around. He set Quip down on the exam table and then leaned against it, crossing his arms over his chest. He glanced at Quip, but she was still staring at the floor.

Damn Manticore.

The Sam guy walked in after him and pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket. The sound of him putting them on, the thin plastic sliding across skin and then snapping as he let go, made the hair on the back of Alec's neck stand up. Beside him, he felt Quip give a slight jerk as each glove snapped.

"You want me to stay or go?" he asked quietly as he looked at the kid. Quip shrugged and stayed silent. "All right, I guess I'll leave…" He took a step toward the door but stopped when he felt a small hand grab the sleeve of his jacket. Turning back around, he saw that she had shifted her gaze from the floor to his face.

"Don't. Please." Her voice was soft but insistent.

"Wouldn't you rather have Max in here?" he asked. Since Max was a woman and everything, it made more sense to him that she be in here rather than him.

Quip shook her head once, and then her gaze uncontrollably snapped back to the floor. Manticore really did know how to train them well.

Sam stepped up beside the exam table and smiled at Quip before looking at Alec. "It might be best for you to stay in here. From what Max told me, you were in Manticore longer than she was, which means you probably know more about transgenics than she does."

"Good to know you and Max like to talk about me," Alec said, making a face. He didn't like the idea of Max going around and telling a doctor about him.

"I only know what she thought was necessary last time I saw her," Sam replied, "We were trying to figure out possible blood donors for transgenics."

Alec shrugged. "Everybody's an O positive. Lucky us."

"Makes things easier in the battle field, I guess," Sam said. When Alec flicked his eyes at him, he laughed. "I used to be an army doctor, back in the day. I worked in military hospitals a long time ago."

Alec's respect for the guy in the lab coat rose a little. "Yeah, that's what the guys at Manticore thought, anyway."

Sam nodded. "Smart guys, though unethical." He turned to Quip and crossed his arms over his chest. "So, a gunshot wound to the side. Let's get that looked at, all right?"


	9. Chapter 9

The door was exactly 3.092 seconds away from Quip if she blurred. Turning the handle and opening the door would take approximately 2.938 seconds, but it was quicker than the bashing the door open, which, with her limited and immature strength, would take 5.9854 seconds, which, factoring in his currently superior speed, would leave Alec 1.290 seconds to grab her before she escaped. Even though he might let her go, Max was lingering somewhere in the hall, and Quip was not confident that she would be able to get past the female X5.

"So, Quip's an interesting name," said the doctor as he pressed a stethoscope against her chest. He was a normal human, over thirty years old, not in the best of shape. He could probably run around 9 miles an hour at his fastest, a speed that would be easily outpaced by her blurring. "How'd you get it?"

Quip glanced at Alec and then back at the doctor. "I chose it."

"Hey, only after I suggested it," said Alec, smirking back at her. He was poking around in the cabinets, opening and closing the doors to investigate. "You wanted to stick with numbers, remember?"

Quip shrugged. "I'm used to numbers."

She zeroed her eyes on the opposite wall as the doctor chuckled. "It would probably be a lot easier if everyone just went by numbers," he said, "Then we wouldn't have all these repeat names. It'd definitely make things simpler around here." He moved the stethoscope around and placed it against her back. "Of course, if everyone had a name as unique yours, then we wouldn't have to worry."

Quip did not reply even though she felt like he was trying to make a joke. She kept her eyes on the wall and tried not to think about anything. Blanking her mind had usually worked back at Manticore; it was easier to let them do things to you when you weren't thinking.

"Hey, Quip, could you lay back for me? It'll be easier for me to examine your wound if you do," said the doctor.

She gripped the edge of the table before slowly swinging her legs up and lying back on the table. The florescent light beamed down on her, and she felt exposed, like she always did back at the labs.

The doctor lifted up the right side of her shirt and peeled back the bandaged that Alec had put over the wound. Her fingers curled, and she had to force them to lie flat. The doctor was gentle as he touched the sides of the bullet hole.

"It could have been worse," he said, "This should only take a few stitches." He turned and started rummaging around in a drawer in the counter behind him.

"Good deal," said Alec. He smiled at her, but she couldn't manage to smile back. She just wanted to get off the table and bolt for the door. However, superior orders were keeping her in place, and it didn't seem likely that she would figure out how to override her training any time soon.

The doctor turned around and laid a few things on a stand beside the table. Quip made a point to look at the ceiling and not at whatever he was doing. "This might sting a little," he said, "I know you've got enough infection-fighting agents in your body that you probably sweat anti-bacterial soap," that got a snort of laughter out of Alec, "but I'm OCD about disinfectant. Do you mind?"

Quip bit her bottom lip and shook her head. Okay, so he was sort of nice. That didn't mean she wanted to talk to him though. She sniffed as he wiped something wet and cool against her side; it stung for a minute but it wasn't anything bad.

"If you don't mind me asking," said the doctor, "how did this happen?"

"She isn't going to talk—" Alec started, but she cut him off. She didn't want to answer, but her mouth opened anyway, forced to by her training. ' _Always answer doctors truthfully. The Truth. Truth._ '

"The two men, in the alley," said Quip. She scratched the thin paper beneath her with her fingertips, and it tore a little. "One of them shot me."

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Alec push away from the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. He didn't look happy. "Whoa, wait, you won't tell me, but you'll tell him?"

"Do you remember what they looked like?" the doctor asked, ignoring Alec's indignation, "Any names?"

"Krenski was tall with a grey suit. Shiny black shoes. Angry eyes. I think he was in charge."

"And the other guy?" Alec demanded, stepping closer. He had angry eyes too, right now. Quip didn't think he was mad at her, but she didn't know who else he could be mad at. The doctor hadn't done anything bad to her…yet.

Quip wriggled uncomfortably. "I don't know, they didn't say his name. He was the SIC. He was wearing a black suit."

"Why did they shoot you?" asked the doctor. His voice was calm, soothing…just like the doctors back at Manticore. They were all the same, weren't they? "It wasn't like you're a threat."

"Technically," Alec said, "she's a carefully designed killing machine, so she is a threat. But these guys wouldn't know that unless she was doing something weird, like blurring." He glanced at Quip. "You weren't, were you?"

"No, I wasn't," she said, shaking her head. But they had seen her blur afterward…She clamped down on her lower lip and looked away from him. He didn't need to know that.

"Quip," the doctor said, picking up a syringe from the tray, "I'm going to give you a local anesthetic, all right? It'll pinch for a minute, but it won't last long, and then you won't feel it anymore."

Quip breath caught in her throat, and she edged away from the doctor as he brought the needle closer. "I don't need it," she protested, "You can do it without it, I don't mind." Her eyes locked onto the slender, shining needle.

"But this is only one needle," said the doctor, "If I don't, you'll feel the stitches."

Quip's gaze focused on the liquid sloshing around in the syringe. Liquid was bad, it was never good. They did things to you with stuff in needles. "I don't want it."

"Hey, it's okay, it's just anesthetic," Alec said. He huffed out a laugh. "You really don't want him to stitch you up without it."

She frowned at him and shook her head. "I don't need it."

"Yeah, I used to say that too," Alec said. He grabbed a rolling stool and pulled it closer. "Never really got me anywhere back then."

"That's different," said Quip, narrowing her eyes at him, "You didn't have a choice."

"No, but I wouldn't have wanted to go without a shot anyway."

Quip crossed her arms over her chest and shot him a frown. "That's a lie."

"Is not," he replied, making a face back at her as he sat down on the stool. "Look, shrimp, 87% percent doesn't mean you're able to read my mind."

"But you wouldn't," Quip said stubbornly. She didn't care what he said; he wouldn't let some doctor stick him with a needle if he had had a choice back a Manticore. That's why she was saying no now.

"Sure." Alec rolled his eyes. "If you say so." He leaned forward and rested his elbows against the table, propping his cheek up with one hand. His right arm bumped up against her left arm. "So, why'd they shoot you?"

"I don't know," Quip said, "They saw me, and I could overhear them talking. Guess they didn't like that."

"No kidding, judging by the hole in your hide," Alec said. He drummed his fingers against the exam table and glanced at her. "What were they talking about?"

Quip shook her head, her fluffy short hair falling into her eyes. "I don't remember."

"And you call me a liar," Alec said. He poked her in the arm. "I know you have an eidetic memory, because I do, and since you're supposedly an improvement, I doubt they'd take that out since it comes in handy, like for remembering phone numbers."

"They were talking about drugs," Quip said reluctantly, "From China. It's bad."

"It's probably just expensive crack or something," said Alec. His face darkened, and he looked over at the door. "They shot you because you overheard a drug deal. That's just great."

Quip did not say anything, but she didn't think it was crack. She knew what crack was, and she had seen what it could do, and what the men had been talking about wasn't crack.

"Done," the doctor said, leaning back.

Quip jerked. She had forgotten he was there. "Done with what?" she asked, turning her head to look at him.

"With the stitches," he replied as he stood up from the chair he had been sitting in. "They're all finished. It took about eight. They should dissolve in a few weeks, so you don't have to worry about coming back in to get them removed."

Quip sat up and looked at her right side. A line of tight, neat black stitches patched her skin together where the wound was. She reached over and poked the thin line. Nothing. Her side was numb. She jerked her head up and glared at the doctor. "You gave me a shot."

"You didn't even notice," said the doctor, turning to her with a smile on his face. "I know you didn't want it, but you did fine."

Quip's frown faltered but revived as she saw Alec grinning. "You distracted me on purpose!"

"Guilty," he replied, "What're you gonna do, sue me?"

"That's not fair," she complained.

"It got the job done, right?" Alec asked, still smiling. Quip wanted to kick him in the shin, but then again, she was also glad that her side was fixed up and didn't hurt. However, kicking him still sounded like an appealing option.

Alec looked over at the doctor. "Is she free to go?"

"Yes." Quip slid off the table as the doctor scribbled something down on a pad of paper. "I'll make out a prescription for anti-pain medication; there are a couple pharmacies that can get you the right stuff. Logan will know which one's." He looked down at Quip and smiled. "Try not to pop your stitches, okay?" He put out a hand as if he was going to pat her shoulder or head, but he stopped at the same time she took a step backwards toward Alec. His smile faded a bit before he nodded at Alec and walked out of the door.

"Nice job, Quip," said Alec, looking down at her. "You only freaked out a little bit."

"I didn't freak out." She hadn't! It was like she had gone running form the room or anything…even though she had thought about it…

Alec ruffled her hair, his hand tousling her dark blond hair so that it fell every which a way. "Sure, kiddo. 'No, don't stick me!'"

"Aleeeeccc," she said, shoving his hand away, "Stop."

Alec snickered. "Fine. Come on, let's go meet up with Super Savior and Max."


	10. Chapter 10

They found Logan and Max sitting in a staff lounge, neither saying anything as they both stared at the almost new magazines on the coffee table in front of them. Max looked like she was undergoing some internal torment and Logan had that pained look that he always wore when Max was being her often angst-ridden self. Alec shook his head. Yep, they were definitely having another emo moment.

"No, no one get up," he said as he and Quip walked toward them. The kid was still peeved, and she kept throwing glares at him for tricking her, but at least she hadn't kicked him yet.

"Did everything go well?" Max asked as she lifted her gaze from intensely staring at the opposite wall.

Alec shrugged. "Guess so. The kid isn't dying any time soon."

"Good to know," Logan said, half-smiling as he got to his feet.

"Hey, does the name Krenski set off your crime-fighting senses?" Alec asked, cocking an eyebrow as he looked over at Logan. If anyone was going to know the name of some obscure drug-dealer, it was going to be Logan. The thought made Alec smirk. Mr. Holier-Than-Thou knew some of the worst people.

"Yeah," said Logan, blinking back at Alec, "He's a Russian-imported drug lord that's been buying off sector police for years now. He sometimes dabbles in human trafficking, a little assassination on the side. Why?"

"He's the guy that shot Quip."

The kid shifted her weight and flicked her gaze up at him with a guilty look. He rolled his eyes at her. It wasn't like it was her fault or anything.

"What was she doing with Krenski?" asked Logan. He glanced from Alec to Quip and then back to Alec.

"More like wrong place, wrong time instead of something intentional," Alec said. He grinned at Quip. "Unless you've been working part time for a cartel."

Quip shook her head and frowned at the floor. Well, that was probably a no then.

"Did you hear anything, Quip, any details about their plans? Is that why they shot you?" asked Logan. He was peering down at the kid with an eager look, sort of like he was about to pounce and wring the information out of her. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to tell the Internet-vigilante about this particular incident. Would've been better if he had handled it himself.

"I don't know…"

Yes, she did. Alec could tell she did by the way she was stubbornly poking her lip out. She just wasn't sure whether or she wanted to tell Logan, but now that he knew, it was probably best if she went ahead and told him everything.

"It's really important," Logan said. He bit his lip for a second and then smiled at her warmly. "Can you try to remember?"

Quip rocked back on her heels and glanced up at Alec. He nodded to her, and she took a deep breath before speaking. "He said something about a new drug coming in Thursday night from Hong Kong. Landing at Mason air strip." She sounded like she was dutifully spitting out facts; at least that was a useful piece of leftover Manticore training.

"I have to call Matt about this," Logan said, straightening up and pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. He had started bending lower when he began talking to Quip. "This could be big. I've been wanting to put Krenski away for years."

"Wait, I don't think Quip should get involved in this," Max said, standing up. She shook her head as she looked down at the seven-year-old. "It isn't safe."

"But if she acts as a witness, the case is that much stronger," said Logan, "It means that Krenski's so low he'd kill a kid to keep his business underground."

"And if he finds she's testifying against him, he'll make sure she doesn't," Alec said. He folded his arms over his chest. This idea didn't sound like a good idea to him; there was nothing in it for Quip besides the guarantee of pissing off the guy that shot her in the first place and the possibility of having him find someone to finish the job.

"If she stays with you or Max, she'll be fine," Logan said, "I wouldn't put her in unnecessary danger, Alec. And nothing's settled. I have to talk to Matt first and figure out how to go about this."

"I know you're all revved about this now, but doesn't Quip get a say in this?" Alec asked.

"Well, yes," Logan said, "I mean, nothing's for certain yet." He looked down at Quip. "Are you willing to do it?"

"Do what?" Quip asked, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Don't worry about it yet," Alec said. He didn't want her to get freaked out or anything by what Logan was saying or suggesting. He knew she understood most of what they were talking about, and once she understood all of it, she might not want to do what Logan wanted her to do. And Alec wasn't going to let Logan guilt-trip her into it. He might have Max completely sold on his save-the-world attitude, but Alec wasn't buying it, not yet, and Quip didn't have to either.

Max looked down at her watch and then up at Logan. "We should probably get going."

"Why? You actually care if Normal fires you or not?" Alec asked as they started for the door. "Never seemed to bother you before, 'missy-miss.'"

Max whipped around and pointed a finger in his face. "Do NOT call me that!"

Alec grinned and shook his head. Sometimes harassing Max was just way too easy.

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After they got into the car, Quip nestled against Alec's side, her head resting against his arm and her dark blond hair flying everywhere, desperately in need of brushing. It was an oddly vulnerable position for the X8; Alec was pretty sure this wasn't her normal behavior. Visiting the hospital must have exhausted her. She was conked out before they left the parking lot.

"I guess you guys actually do want to go to work," Logan said as he pulled onto the road, his beat-up car navigating the clogged streets of Seattle.

"Not particularly," said Alec. He leaned back in the seat and traced a smiley face on the window next to him. "I'd be okay with missing a day."

"You already skipped work twice this week," Max said, throwing a frown back in his direction, "Normal really is going to fire your ass if you don't watch it."

"I have other asses to watch besides mine," Alec replied, a devilish smirk on his face. "Biking everywhere does wonderful things for the female anatomy."

Max gaped at him in disgust, her mouth open. "Ugh, Alec. You're such a perv."

"It's the truth," Alec said. He brushed some of Quip's hair off of his arm. "Why else would Sketchy work there in the first place?"

Max decided to glare out the window and pretend he didn't exist. Heh.

"I guess I can just take Quip back to the apartment with me," Logan said, interrupting their bickering.

"I have a feeling she's not going to want to go with you," Alec said. He glanced down at the pint-sized transgenic. "She's sort of anti-human right now."

"So you're just going to leave her at Jam Pony while you make your runs?" Max asked, whipping her head around to look at him.

"Normal will keep an eye on her," he replied.

"What? Normal will probably give her a stack of packages and tell her to go make herself useful. You can't leave her with him."

"Max. The man adores me in a weird, unfortunate yet entirely convenient way," said Alec. Seattle passed by outside the window and he tossed her a cheeky smile. "I don't think he'll mind babysitting my adorable little sister."

"Alec…" Max started, but she trailed off and then turned her head to look out the window again.

"What?" Alec asked.

"Never mind." She shook her head. "Just…don't get too attached."

Alec frowned at her and then looked back down at Quip. He wasn't getting attached. She was just some snot-nosed, ankle-biting, smart-mouthed X8 brat who he'd be glad to get rid of when the time came. He ruffled her hair and leaned against the door. Nope, he wouldn't have any problem when Max decided to send her away. But not to Canada. Damn Mounties.


	11. Chapter 11

After stopping by a store and picking up Quip a new outfit, just new sneakers, a pair of jeans and a light blue long-sleeve (Max swore she'd do more shopping while she was supposed to be at work), they drove over to Jam Pony, the bike messenger place where Max and Alec worked. Quip actually knew about Jam Pony; she had seen bike messengers from there around the city, always going somewhere with those shoulder bags. And they got through the sector gates easier than anyone else. If Quip had been older, she would have stolen one of the passes, but no one was going to mistake a seven-year-old for a twenty-year-old.

Jam Pony was one of the busiest places Quip had ever been. Soup kitchens and orphanages were pretty orderly compared to this…mess. Adults were walking in and out of the building, jumping on and off bikes, tires squealed, music played, the TV blared. People shouted at each other, fist-bumped, ran out the door pushing bikes, yelled something back before disappearing down the street. And over it all, the man with glasses and a sweater-vest was shouting orders, throwing packages at people and making demands.

It actually looked like fun.

Quip stuck close to Alec as he maneuvered his way through the people and bikes to get to the front desk where the blond man was. Alec had said his name was Normal, which Quip thought was not a good name. Of course he was normal. There was no way he could be a transgenic, not with glasses and excess fat that served no purpose.

The blond man looked at Max and Alec with disdain as the three of them walked up to the counter. He shuffled through some of the packages and envelopes around before pulling out a manila envelope and flinging it at Alec. Alec caught it before it could whack him in the face. Quip thought the blond man was borderline crazy, if not just rude.

The blond guy, Normal, didn't even look at them while he talked. "Missy-miss, fired. Small, misplaced street urchin, out. Alec, hot run to East Street. Double time, bip, bip, bip!"

"Whatever, Normal," Max said, rolling her eyes and walking towards the lockers in the back of the room. On the way over, she was stopped by a tall guy with shaggy blond hair and a goatee who seemed unhappy that someone named OC had forced him into covering for her and Alec. Quip stopped eavesdropping on their conversation when both of them looked at her; Max smiled at her and then went over to the lockers.

Alec leaned against the counter, looking like he owned the place instead of just worked there. "Hey, Normal, could you do me a favor?"

"You're my favorite degenerate, Alec, but I make it a habit to not do favors for employees," Normal said. He grabbed two more packages and hurled them at two people who were trying to leave. "42nd and Carpenter. Shoo!" They both gave him hateful scowls that would have gotten Quip six months in solitary if she had looked at a superior like that back at Manticore. Normal ignored them as he glanced back at Alec. "What do you want?"

"Nothing much-"

Normal flicked his eyes to Quip again and made a face. "You, scat! We don't give handouts, free food or hugs, so get. Scam someone else, vagabond!" He waved his arms at her as if trying to scare off a cat.

Quip crossed her arms over her chest and glared up at Alec. She didn't scam people. They just gave her stuff.

"Actually," Alec said, smirking at Normal, "This is my sister. I'm babysitting for my parents for the week while they take a trip to the countryside." He put his hand on her head, but she batted it away and put her hands on her hips. She wasn't pet-able.

"This is your urchin? This is why you missed work?" Normal stared at her through his thick glasses, and she stared right back. Normal blinked first. "Doesn't look a thing like you."

Alec shrugged. "What can I say? She missed out on all the good genes."

Her foot landed on his ankle before she knew she was moving. He didn't wince or even make a noise, but he shot her a split-second grimace before looking back at Normal with a winning smile. Jerk.

"Could she stay here?" he asked, "I mean, I'll be back at the end of the day and everything, and you won't even know she's here. Swear."

Normal hurled a few more packages at the bike messengers before turning his attention back to Alec. "It's against company policies to have a child on the premises," he said. He started riffle through some papers and envelopes, ignoring Alec.

Quip looked around the room and caught a trio of the bike messenger girls looking at her, grinning and tittering to each other. She looked up at Alec, but he wasn't paying her attention. Sighing, she reached up and tugged on his shirt sleeve. He crouched down to her level.

"What?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

"I don't have to stay here," she hissed at him, "I can go. I'll be fine alone."

Alec rolled his eyes. "Yeah, no, I don't think so. I'm not letting a seven-year-old stay alone in my apartment. You'll wreck something."

"Will not! And I don't have to go to your apartment."

"Somehow I don't think roaming the streets is actually a good idea for you right now." He stood back up, bumping her gently in the back of the head with the heel of his palm as he did so.

Quip crossed her arms over her chest. This wasn't fair. No had taken care of her since she had gotten out of Manticore. Now here he was, bossing her around like he was her superior. Just because some guy might or might not be after her didn't mean he would get her. She was an X8, no human was going to catch her.

Alec turned back to the desk. "Normal, come on, it's not like she's going to be a pain," he said, "I was going to leave her with a friend, but she really wanted to come meet you."

That caught Normal's attention. He stopped going through the letters and papers and looked up at Alec. "She wanted to meet me?" He narrowed his eyes at her, but she stood her ground. "Why?"

"I told her about my boss, and how he's such a great guy and how he supported me when I was boxing, and how he went to Harvard, and man, the kid was excited. She wanted to meet you…" Alec shook his head and knelt down next to Quip. "Sorry, kiddo, but I guess Normal doesn't have time today." He winked at her.

Huh? Oh… Pouting, she let her head drop and her shoulders droop.

"Aw…okay," she said. She added a sniffle for effect, knowing that it usually sent adults into a sympathetic panic.

Normal put everything down on the desk. "Wait. I mean, what did she want to know?"

Alec stood up, his face falling into a serious mask. "She just likes meeting influential people, you know? She likes hearing their stories, but I can take her back home."

Normal grabbed another package and handed it to Alec. "You're already late for the East Street run. She can stay here, if she stays quiet and doesn't distract the staff. If there's one thing I don't need, it's another distraction for the riffraff."

"She'll be a mouse," Alec said, holding up his hands and smiling.

"I don't like mice," Normal grumbled. He walked out from behind the desk and stomped off to berate some "degenerates."

"Fair enough," Alec said, shrugging. He grinned at Quip. "At least he's letting you stay."

"I don't wanna stay," Quip said. "Can't I go back to the apartment? Or with you?"

Alec shook his head. "Nah, I don't have a baby seat on my bike."

She shot him a glare. "I don't need a baby seat. I could…"

"Sit on the handle bars?" he finished when she couldn't come up with anything. He smiled at her. "I know you've got awesome balance and everything, but I don't want to chance it. It'll be fine here, they're…decent. Just stay out of the bathrooms, and you'll be okay."

Quip didn't want to know what happened in the bathrooms. She followed Alec as he walked over to the rack and grabbed his bike. It was one of the nicer ones.

While Alec checked the tires and the chain, the three bike messengers that had been looking at them earlier approached, looking sort of like a pack of predators instead of people. Quip instinctively moved closer to Alec, one of her own pack. Strength in numbers, right?

The one in front, a redhead with multiple ponytails and a sleeveless top, stopped in front of them and beamed at Quip. "Oh, my God, Alec, she's adorable!"

"Huh?" Alec looked up from the bike as Quip stepped behind him. Usually she used her looks to her advantage, but right now she felt out of place and reliant on the older transgenic. It wasn't the best feeling. "Oh, the kid?"

"Hell yeah!" said the redhead. She squatted down to get on Quip's level, but Quip only retreated closer to the bike rack and Alec. "What a sweetheart!"

"Must not be related to Alec, then," said a second woman. She was shorter than the other two women and had a mousy face with hair to match tied back in a braid.

Alec rolled his eyes at her. "Because you're just a treasure, right, Hermione?" The mousy-faced girl glared at him and tossed her long braid.

"Where did you find her?" asked a girl with blond hair. She was a little chubby, but it made her look nicer than the other two. In Manticore, though, she would have been doing extra laps. She looked at Quip with a warm smile. "I've never seen such a cute kid, look at those eyes! Is she yours?"

Alec smirked and shook his head. "Nah, she's my sister," he said, "She's a little shy." He nudged Quip with his knee. "Say hey, short stuff."

"Hi," Quip said obediently.

"Oooo, I could eat her up!" the redhead declared, clapping her hands together. She seemed to be a few cartridges short of a full ammunition belt. She leaned forward, and Quip felt like all those red ponytails were going to attack her. "How old are you, sweetie?"

"Seven," Quip answered. She looked up at Alec. Why couldn't he just take her with him? The look on his face was easy to read: smile and endure. He was going to owe her after this.

"Oh, she is so cute! Can I have her?" The redhead reached a hand out to Quip, and she disappeared behind Alec's bike probably faster than the humans' eyes could track.

"Ooo, skittish, isn't she?" the redhead exclaimed, blinking as she stood up. Alec shot Quip a reproving look, but she pretended to be interested in the spokes on his bike. She wasn't ashamed of running. That woman was…not cool.

"She just isn't very good around strangers," Alec said.

Quip made a face. That was a lie. She was really good with strangers…but these Jam Pony people were strange.

"Aww, that's so cute," said the redhead, "What's her name?"

"Quip," answered Alec. He leaned against the bike rack and grinned at the women. "Dad wanted to keep with the clever theme."

"That's silly," said the mouse-faced woman, Hermione, "Quip isn't a real name."

"We can't all be named after characters in children's books," Alec said, "But damn, wouldn't that be nice?"

The mouse-faced woman scowled at him and then flounced off, her braid swinging behind her back. Alec snickered and looked back at the other two women. "What's got her panty's in a twist?"

"Maybe it's the fact that you don't want to get in them," said the redhead as she straightened up and brushed her hands off on her jeans.

Alec wrinkled his nose. "Ugh, no way. That woman hates me."

"No, she love-hates you," said the redhead, "Big difference."

"Sexually-driven, lustful employees Leah and Emma!" Normal yelled from the window, "Rears in gear, hot runs to Laird and Beeman! Bip, bip, bip!" He waved a couple packages in the air and glared at them.

The redhead brushed a few free strands of hair back from her face. "Geez, I hate him. But it's a job, you know?"

"We all know," the blond-haired woman said. She sighed as she looked at Quip. "I want one just like her…"

The two women headed over to get their packages, and Alec turned to Quip. "Wanna come out from behind the bike?"

"Defensive maneuver," she muttered as she skirted the bike and came to his side.

Alec snorted. "Manticore brat."

"You too," she replied. She rubbed her squeaky new sneakers together. "Can I—"

"You'll be fine here, I swear," Alec said, "And you're not allowed to leave, by the way. Consider it an order, if that'll make you feel better."

Quip shoved a lock of dark blond hair and frowned up at him. "It doesn't."

"Sorry," he said. "Look, I'll make it up to you later, okay?"

"Fine."

"Good!" He roughly ruffled her hair before yanking his bike away from the others. They walked over to the counter, Quip following behind Alec with her feet dragging. Alec grabbed her and put her on the counter. "Don't do anything stupid, okay?"

"You neither," she replied. She pulled her legs into a cross-legged position and put her elbows on her knees. She watched as he rode out of the doorway. He raised his hand and saluted her roguishly before disappearing behind the side of the building.

"And there he goes, the great, golden warrior," Normal said in an extremely reverent tone. He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth and sighed. "Not one like him. Not one." He shook his finger at Quip. "You're lucky he's your brother."

She scrunched up her nose, and Normal crossed his arms over his chest. "What? You are, little missy-miss." Turning around, he shouted at couple more of his workers before whipping back toward her. "So, what's your moniker?"

"Quip," she replied reluctantly.

He raised an eyebrow, probably surprised that she knew what 'moniker' meant. "That's a nickname," he finally grumbled, "What's your real name?"

"My real name is Quip," she said, flicking her eyes up at him. It was better than a string of numbers and letters, wasn't it?

"Quip. A clever, usually taunting remark. Or a witty or funny observation or response usually made on the spur of the moment. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary." He tossed a pile of letters on top of one of the boxes. "Not a name."

"It's my name, and I like it," Quip replied. When he frowned at her, she added a soft, obligatory, "Sir."

That seemed to make him extremely happy. He puffed out his chest and gave a smug smile. "You have manners. Good to see that the entire world hasn't lost them."

He moved around for a few minutes, avoiding the part of the counter where she as sitting, obviously trying to ignore that she was there. Quip contented herself with watching the Jam Pony employees, picking up on their relationships and behaviors, things that Manticore had taught her to look for.

"Well," Normal finally said, walking towards her with a frown on his face. The frown actually seemed to be his permanent facial expression. "If you're going to stay here, you might as well make yourself useful." He handed her a stack of papers and a stamp. "Take a paper and stamp here, in this box. And make sure it's straight. That should be simple enough. Can you do that?"

"Yes, sir," Quip said, adding the sir just because it seemed to put him in a better mood.

Normal allowed himself a half-smile. "Maybe you won't grow up to be like the rest of these delinquents." He gave a curt nod and then jerked his head up to glare at some employees that had started doing tricks on their bikes. "Hey, moronic nimrods, cease and desist with the company property!"

Quip sighed and looked toward the door way. Alec had better come back soon. Or else.


	12. Chapter 12

When Alec finally got back to Jam Pony for good at the end of the day, he found Normal ranting to someone who was as short as the counter about boxing matches that Alec had been in.

"And then, hey, listen up," Normal said, looking down. Alec could see the top of Quip's head above the counter, but that was all. "And then your brother popped up next to Sam-Bo and socked him right in the kisser." Normal bobbed and weaved and threw a sloppy jab into the air. "Right there, right in the mouth. Sam-Bo didn't know what hit him. He was down of the count, and your brother won me more money than I knew what to do with." Normal sighed and leaned back against the counter, shaking his head in admiration. "That man is a god."

"A hungry god," Alec said as he walked up to the counter, pushing his bike beside him, "But I don't think gods are supposed to be hungry." He glanced over the side of the counter and grinned at Quip. The kid was standing beside Normal. She flicked her eyes up at him with a long-suffering look before smiling at Normal and nodding. Smart kid.

"Speak of the angel," Normal said, turning toward Alec. He patted Quip on the head and smirked at Alec. "I was just telling your sister about your conquests in the ring of combat. Great stuff, back then."

Alec almost lost it at the look on Quip's face. If Normal patted her again like that, he might lose a hand.

"Yeah…" Alec drawled, his voice full of veiled sarcasm, "Good times." He clapped his hands together. "Well, I'm clocked out. Ready to go, squirt?"

Quip's face lit up like he had given her a pony. "Yes!" She darted around the doorway and stood by his side. Still keeping up with the ruse, she grabbed Alec's hand and smiled with childish embarrassment at Normal. "Thank you, Mr. Normal, for letting me spend the day with you."

Normal slipped back into his belligerent persona and waved his hand at her. "Sure, sure. Now get out of here, I'm not paying you overtime, even if you are my golden boy."

Alec hid a smirk as he turned around and headed back toward the entrance, Quip's small hand still in his. When they were out on the street, she dropped his hand and the cute little girl act, reverting back to her slightly feral X8 state.

"What took you so long?" she asked, peering up at him with his own eyes and an irritated expression he knew his face made. That was so friggin' weird.

"Well, sometimes people have to eat, and when people have X5 moral-infused ice queens breathing down their necks about not stealing crap constantly, people have to get jobs and actually do work in order to eat. It sucks." Alec frowned as he thought about Max and her save-the-world morality complex. "Of course, that doesn't mean people can't supplement their income with extra, nighttime activities on the side."

"You work as a call-boy?" Quip was staring at him now, her mouth open with disgust, nose scrunched up, face wrinkled. "Ew…that's gross."

Alec froze. A woman walking in the opposite direction nearly collided into him. Still ogling Quip, he side-stepped the woman. "What?! Hell no! I steal things. You know, cat-burgling?"

A tiny, infuriating smile dashed across Quip's face. "Mhmm."

"I am not a call-boy!" he exclaimed. People around them turned and stared, eyebrows raised. Alec's face grew hot as he realized that he had forgotten his surroundings. The kid was throwing him off. He glared at Quip and started walking again, swinging his arms in aggravation as she smothered a giggle.

"It's not that bad," Quip said, trotting to keep up with him. Her little legs were no match for his lengthy stride. "You could be a kidney-peddler. Now that'd be bad."

"Quip, I'm not a call-boy or a kidney-peddler," Alec said, "I'm a simple, innocent bike messenger."

"Okay, okay," Quip said, holding up her hands. "Whatever you say." He could tell she was about to start giggling again when a grimace passed over her face, and she dropped her arms. The anesthesia must have worn off by now; her side was probably aching.

"How much does it hurt?" He flicked his fingers against her shoulders as she started to shrug, a gesture he was starting to realize was her way of deflecting a question. "Truth, Quip." He watched her closely as she shifted uncomfortably.

"Just a little," she said. "It's not bad."

"Do you, uh, do you want me to carry you?"

"No way," Quip replied, shaking her head, "I can walk." Alec nodded. He understood.

After a few minutes of silence, Quip piped back up again. "So, where are we going?"

"Logan's," Alec replied, "It's not that far. He's got your pain meds, and he's making dinner so he can grill you about the drug dealer." Well, that wasn't how Max had put it when she had told him about the dinner plans and invited him over to her not-boyfriend's apartment, but Alec knew where it was going.

"Oh," Quip said. She was looking across the street as they walked, her eyes dark and confused.

"Look," Alec said, "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Especially for humans. You don't owe them anything."

"I know," Quip replied. She shrugged and didn't look up at him. "I'm thinking about it."

"Just…don't feel like you have to do it. He can't make you play Cops and Robbers." Alec sighed and put his hands into his jacket pockets. His right hand pressed against the cold steel of the gun he always carried. "Max has a habit of saying we're free to rebel now. So rebel if you don't like it. Understand?"

"Nope."

He couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or truly didn't understand. It legitimately could have been either. He decided not to press the issue. "So, wanna hear about this crazy cat lady I delivered a package to? I think she had about twenty cats in the apartment…"

They spent the rest of the trip to Fogel Towers talking about Alec's job and some of the crazy characters he had encountered. Quip also gave him her full, detailed opinion of "that creepy guy you work for."

When they reached the apartment building, Alec took her around to a staff entrance and scanned an employee card that he had swiped ages ago. Stupid people had never taken that code out of the system, and now he had access to Logan's apartment if he ever needed to get in. The guy had nice, expensive shit, and he probably wouldn't notice if some of it went missing every now and then. Of course, that would be a desperate last measure, one that Alec would only take if he was starving to death. Or needed a new leather jacket. Whatever came first.

The elevator took them to the penthouse. As they entered Logan's fancy, modern apartment, Alec snuck a peek at Quip's face. She was looking around, trying not to be wide-eyed, but her hands were already reaching out to all the expensive crap. She had probably never been in a place like this before.

"We're in here!" Logan called from the kitchen. Alec put a hand on Quip's shoulder and steered her toward the kitchen. Logan was standing in front of the stove, stirring something in a pan. It smelled delicious, not that Alec would ever admit it. Max, looking like she was trying to play housewife and doctor at the same time, was chopping vegetables with surgical gloves on. Logan-killing virus prevention. That thing was really a bitch.

Max looked up and grinned at Quip. "Hey, I've got some stuff for you." She pulled off the gloves and threw them in the trash before walking out into the living room. "Come on!" she called, "I think you'll like it."

Quip looked up at Alec, and he nodded his head in the direction Max had gone. Sighing, she headed off after Max. He followed them and then stood in the doorway, his arms folded over his chest. The couch was covered in girl clothes. There were shirts, pants, two pairs of miniature shoes that were not any bigger than Alec's hand, underwear, hair ties, a small black leather jacket (a necessary accessory for every Manticore alum) and one little dress that would probably make the kid look like a baby doll if they could manage to stuff her into it. Nothing looked too awfully girlie, and nothing was pink. Alec was pretty sure that Quip was not a pink kind of girl.

Quip looked at the couch and then up at Max. "What are these for?"

"They're yours," Max said. She leaned over and picked up one of the shirts, a simple blue t-shirt with a couple yellow flowers on the bottom. "OC and me picked them out. I didn't know what you like, so we grabbed a lot of different things."

"But I don't have any money," Quip protested.

"It's okay, you can pay me back later," Max said.

Like Max had paid for them in the first place.

In the kitchen, Logan gave an audible huff. Super-Savior still didn't approve of stealing, though he didn't seem to mind when Max was stealing stuff for him. Ah, well, twisted morals for everyone.

Tentatively, Quip started picking through the clothes, her tiny hands grasping soft shirt material and tough jeans. Leaving Max to do all the fun girlie stuff, Alec walked back into the kitchen and sat down on a stool at the table. Like usual, he didn't feel like playing dumb games where everyone evaded the main topic of discussion.

"So, what do you want her to do?"

"Matt and I spent the day running logistics on Krenski and the details Quip told us," Logan said. He lifted a bottle of sauce and poured it into the pan. It crackled and popped before settling back down. "Turns out there is a plane coming from Hong Kong, but it's supposed to be delivering mattresses."

"Riiight," Alec said. He stretched and grabbed a wine bottle and a glass that were sitting on the other side of the island counter. He poured himself a drink. Not as good as Scotch, but whatever. He wasn't picky.

"Matt says his team is planning to close in on Krenski on Thursday at the Mason strip when the shipment comes in," Logan said. "If nothing goes wrong, the trial will be Friday, and that's when Quip will testify against him, if she decides to."

"I'll talk to her about it," Alec said, "But I'm not promising anything."

Logan nodded, but Alec still wasn't sure if he really understood that Quip might say no. Logan liked to assume that everyone was going to do what he considered "the right thing."

"I've arranged for some friends of mine to take her to Canada immediately after the trial, even if she doesn't want to testify," Logan said. He turned the stove off and picked up a pile of plates from the counter. Gears whirled as he walked over to the dining area, going through the motions of setting the table as if it this was some sort of traditional meal. "There's a family that wants a daughter around her age, and they'll be glad to have her, no matter the circumstances."

Alec cocked an eyebrow. "They seriously don't mind having a lethal weapon in their house?"

"Well." Logan laid a ceramic plate on the table. "I might not have divulged all the details…"

"Then they're adopting what I'm pretty sure is the equivalent of a highly sophisticated tracking system with latent homicidal tendencies, a territorial complex and possible psychological damage?" Alec snorted. "You're a good friend."

"I think things will go smoother for her and them if that topic isn't brought up," Logan said, "She'll be able to live a normal life, with a normal family in normal environment." Logan put another plate down on the table and glanced up at Alec. "Isn't that what you want for her?"

Alec frowned. "Yeah, but the problem with that whole…set-up is that she isn't normal. She's not going to fit in, even if she tries. I mean, come on, look at Max."

"What about Max?" the female X5 demanded from the living room. She walked over and stood in the archway that led from the kitchen to the living room, her hands on her hips. She looked pointedly at Alec who took another sip of wine.

"I'm just saying that even though you try to be normal, you always get caught up in weird shit," Alec said. "I mean, how many normal girls spend their nights trying to save the local mutant population from discovery?"

Max and Logan shared one of those soulful looks that bored Alec to tears.

"I'm taking that as a not many."

"At least she'll have a chance," Max said, "It's the best we can give her."

Alec was about to retort that it wasn't much of one, being in Canada and all, but Quip chose that moment to come in, a floppy grey hat on her head. The three of them fell silent as the kid rushed up to Alec, grinning.

"Look at what Max got me!" she declared, tossing her head to show off the hat. It was the first time he could remember her really smiling. She almost looked like a real kid. Alec smirked and tugged on the sides of the hat.

"It's too big."

"Is not. I like it," she said stubbornly.

"Your liking it doesn't make it fit any better," Alec replied. He looked over at Max. "Are you trying to buy her over with clothes?"

"Hey, it's not my fault I know how to reach a sister," Max said. She pushed her long dark hair back behind her shoulders and smiled at Quip. "Besides, OC picked out the hat, not me."

"Dinner's ready," Logan announced as he put the last plate and silverware set on the table. "If everyone's ready to eat."

Alec took another swig of wine before walking over to the table. He might need it for this meal.


	13. Chapter 13

After dinner, Logan asked Quip a bunch of questions about what had happened in the alley and the two men. She grudgingly answered as best as she could, hoping he would leave her alone eventually to eat her ice cream in peace. Ice cream really was good stuff. It was vanilla with chocolate syrup on it and these rainbow-colored sugar bits called sprinkles. She had never had it before, but now she was going to want it every day.

"So…what would I have to do?" Quip asked, raising her eyebrows as she looked up from the ice cream when he finished talking.

"I'm not going to say it's not going to be dangerous, but you'll be protected," Logan started, sounding very positive about the situation. Quip glanced at Alec who shook his head and became engrossed in the rain that was hitting the window. He looked annoyed. She turned her gaze back toward Logan, and he continued.

"It's really actually simple. All you have to do is sit on the witness stand and tell the judge and the jury what you told me."

"Is that it?"

"Yeah, that's it," Logan said. He smiled at her and leaned back in his chair.

"We'll be there the entire time," Max said, trying to be reassuring.

"And you've already had practice dodging bullets," Alec added. He was tossing Logan glares when he wasn't looking out the window. Quip didn't think that Alec was happy with Logan right now.

"We're going to hope there's no need for any more bullet-dodging," Logan said. He turned his attention back to Quip. "Are you willing to do it?"

"What happens after I do it?" she asked. She bit her lower lip. She had overheard the plans, but she wanted them to tell her too.

"Well, there's a family in Canada that would like to adopt you," Logan said. He tilted his head to the side. "Would you like to live with them? They're good people."

Quip shrugged. She really didn't want to, but she wasn't used to saying no. She bowed her head and stole a glance at Alec. She didn't want to leave Seattle. She liked it here, and she didn't know anything about Canada except that it was north. She wasn't particularly fond of north.

"You don't have to tell us yet," Max exclaimed, "You can wait."

"Okay," Quip said. She ate another spoonful of ice cream and looked back at Logan. "Would it help if I, um, testified?"

"It wouldn't hurt the case."

"Except it might hurt you," Alec said. He looked at her, his eyes dark.

"Alec," Max said, shaking her head.

Alec held up his hands. "I'm just saying, there's risk involved. It's not a cake walk."

"I didn't say it was," Logan said, "It's your choice, Quip, and you can always back out if you don't want to do it anymore."

Quip looked at her ice cream. It was melting, sticky chocolate disappearing beneath pools of warming vanilla. "I guess I can try," she finally said, looking back up at the others. "I want to help."

"And the self-sacrificing X5 chick gets a sidekick," Alec muttered under his breath. Max glared at him, but he only stared back at her.

"Great! I'll let Matt know in the morning," Logan said. He stood up and started to gather their empty ice cream bowls. "This will really help out, Quip. Thank you."

She rolled her shoulders around, not really knowing what to say.

"Speaking about morning," Max said, "Quip, do you want to go home with me tonight? OC said she'd make hot chocolate, and you can have my bed."

Quip bowed her head. "Can…can I go home with Alec?"

Max pulled back, seemingly shocked. "Sure, if that's what you want…"

"Great," Alec said, rolling his eyes and standing up, "Another night with mini-me. Joy." But Quip could tell he wasn't mad because the right side of his mouth was turned up. He was trying not to smile. He looked into the living room. "I guess we should grab your new gear and head out then."

"I'll get you a bag," Max said. She gracefully stood up and headed into the living room.

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Back at Alec's apartment, Quip took a quick shower, careful of the stitches in her side. When she got out, she was exhausted. She changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt. It had been a long day, and the painkillers she had taken at Logan's were finally making her drowsy.

Barefoot, she walked out into the living room, her hair lying on her back in stringy wet strands. Alec was watching TV, mindlessly flipping through channels. She headed to the couch and sprang up onto it. The blanket she had used last night was still there and so was the big pillow. She cuddled it and burrowed down in the cushions, her head pressed against the pillow.

"There're pajamas in there," Alec said, nodding toward the bag of Max had sent home with them.

Quip lifted her head from the pillow and grinned at him. "Did you look through my stuff?"

"No, I saw them at Logan's," Alec replied. He crossed his arms over his chest. "Just thought since Max got them, you could use them."

"It's a nightgown," Quip said. She wrinkled her nose and put her head back down on the pillow. Even though it had frills and stuff, it reminded her too much of the sleeping gowns she had worn back at Manticore. And it had frills and stuff. Quip wasn't going to wear it.

"Not wearing it?"

"Nope."

There was silence for a few minutes until Alec sighed and turned the TV off. He looked over at her. "You can have the bed, Quip."

"I don't want it," she mumbled. She glanced at him. "You can have it."

"You didn't seem to mind the bed when I first saw you."

"It's lumpy."

"The couch is worse."

"I like the couch." She glared at him.

"Fine, have it your way." He stood up and moved toward his bedroom. He stopped, his hand on the doorjamb. "Um, do you want more blankets?"

"I'm good," she drawled. She was half-asleep and couldn't keep her eyes open anymore.

She heard Alec laugh and imagined him shaking his head. "Okay, kid. Good night." The lights went off, and Quip started a dreamless sleep.


	14. Chapter 14

The next morning, Alec was woken up by his cell phone vibrating on his bed stand. He glared at the offending piece of technology and rolled over, pulling his pillow over his head. It didn't work. He could still hear it vibrating. Damn his genetically enhanced hearing. Groaning, he reached over and grabbed the phone.

"Hello?"

"It's me," Max's voice said. She sounded way too awake, but the morning pissy-ness factor was right. Except she always sounded that way to Alec. "Get up."

"What happened to please, if you could?" Alec said as he flopped back onto the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. "And I don't have to get up for another hour, Ms. Sunshine."

"You have to get up now if you want to go to Joshua's and get back to Jam Pony in time for work."

Alec propped himself up on his elbow. "Why the hell am I going to Joshua's?"

"Because that's the safest place for Quip right now if one of us isn't with her," Max said, "She's wanted by Russian mobsters, remember?"

"Sort of hard to forget," Alec replied. He looked out into the living room; nothing was moving so he assumed that the kid was still asleep. Good, she needed it. "You really think Joshua's is better than Jam Pony?"

"I don't know, but at least I'll know she's with someone I trust," Max said. There was a pause. "And there's always a chance that this guy has someone at Jam Pony."

"Slim chance," Alec said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up in the same fluid motion. Barefoot, he padded over to the open doorway and leaned against the doorjamb. Quip was still sleeping. The tip of her mop-top blond head was showing, but the rest of her little body was buried beneath the covers, curled up on herself in a tight ball. "Look, Max, I love the big guy and everything, but I'm not sure Josh is exactly the best babysitter material."

"You left her with Normal yesterday, and you're complaining about Joshua?"

She had a point. Leaving Quip with Normal had been an unintentional form of mild torture for the kid, but she'd been through worse. A lot worse. "Yeah, but Normal doesn't try to eat acrylics or think that macaroni and cheese makes up the entire food pyramid."

"Joshua only tried that once, and the man is not a chef," Max said. She huffed, and Alec could imagine the glare on her face. "Seriously, Alec, if you haven't killed her yet, then Joshua shouldn't have any problems."

Alec scowled at the opposite wall. What was that supposed to mean? Of course he hadn't killed Quip, he wasn't a moron. He knew what to do for her…sorta. "Geez, Max, glad to know you trust me so much."

"She's a little girl, and you're you," Max said, "Sorry if the combination doesn't sound like a good one to me."

He glanced toward the couch. Quip was awake. Her sharp eyes were on him as she pushed the blankets off and sat up, kicking the covers farther down to the end of the couch.

"Joshua will probably like having company anyway," Alec said, suddenly not in the mood to argue any more. "I'll see you at work, Max."

"Later."

Alec flipped his phone closed and walked into the living room, his feet sticking on the cold floor. As he came toward her, Quip slipped off the edge of the couch.

"Who was that?" she asked, glancing at the phone.

"Max," Alec replied, "She said you annoyed the hell out of everyone at Jam Pony, so you're not allowed back."

Quip put her hands on her hips, looking a little too Max-ish for him at the moment. "Nuh-uh."

"Uh-huh," he said, indulging in a moment of childishness.

"No, she didn't." Quip must have decided that if he was going to act younger, she was going to act older.

"Damn, you caught me with your dazzling intuition," Alec said, smirking at his seven-year-old female copy. Hungry, he walked into the kitchen, Quip following behind him. "She just wants you to meet a friend of ours. His name's Joshua. He's Manticore too. You like bagels?" He snatched the almost empty bag of bagels from the counter and held it up.

"I think so," Quip said, "Who's Joshua?"

"He's a Manticore person. He's sort of…doggish." Alec gestured at his face, trying to explain but not knowing exactly how to put it. He stopped trying. "You'll see when we get there."

Quip nodded solemnly and scrambled up onto the counter. He noticed that she gritted her teeth when her side stretched. She started walking along the countertop, opening and peeking into cabinets. "Can I have syrup on the bagel?"

Alec opened the cabinet closest to him. He pulled out the syrup and set it down before reaching over and picking up the small, orange pill container from the ledge over the kitchen sink. Popping the cap open, he tapped out two white pills that he put beside the bottle of syrup. "If you take that medicine, then yeah, sure you can have syrup and chocolate milk and whatever else you want with your bagel."

"But I don't need them," Quip said. She sat down on the counter and glared at the pills. "It doesn't hurt."

Alec snorted. "Look, kiddo, you're not in Manticore anymore. No one's gonna yell at you for feeling pain, understand?"

Sweeping up the two pills, he walked over to Quip and held out a hand. She stared at him for a moment before looking down at his hand. Slowly, she extended her own hand in a fist. He flipped her hand over and gently pried her tiny, slender fingers open so he could drop the two pills into her palm.

"Take those, all right?" he said. While she looked down at the two pills with narrowed eyes, he ran her a cup of water. "I'm not trying to poison you, that's not my job." He set the cup down beside her before heading back over to the bag of bagels.

While he was fixing one of the bagels, he heard her quickly down the pills before jumping off the counter. Small bare feet made little noise as she came up beside him, the top of her head level with the countertop. She got up on her tiptoes and glanced at the bagels. "You're putting syrup on those, understand?"

"Sure thing, short-stack," Alex said, grinning to himself. Victory was his.

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"Look, Quip, don't freak out or anything when you see Josh, all right? He's a big, giant dog-man."

Quip looked up at him, annoyance quite clear on her face. "You've told me that about twenty times already."

They were walking down the sidewalk in Joshua's run-down neighborhood. There were multiple burned-out trash barrels, broken down cars and grungy people lining the streets. Neither Alec nor the kid gave any of it a second glance, and that seemed to speak volumes about how lousy their lives were to Alec. They were used to squalor and decay now. Maybe Quip would be better off in Canada if it meant she could get away from this city.

He glanced down at her. "If you run screaming in the other direction, I'm going to be pissed."

"Aleeec," Quip whined. She frowned, looking past the rim of the floppy grey hat she had insisted on wearing. Besides the hat, she was wearing jeans and a green t-shirt with a smattering of stars on it; it managed to make her look like the cute, innocent little kid that she wasn't. It was sort of frightening how easy it was to disguise a killing machine. "I'm not going to do that."

Alec held up his hands. "I'm just saying."

They crossed the street and trotted up the crumbling steps to Joshua's house. Alec glanced down at Quip and got a scowl in return. She wanted him to go ahead and quit worrying about her reaction, but he wasn't sure if he had prepared her enough for Joshua. He had tried to tell her about the seven foot tall dog-man mutant hybrid, but seriously, how was he supposed to explain that adequately?

Bracing himself for what he considered the inevitable, he knocked on the door and put his hands in his pockets. "Yo, dog-boy, you home?"

"One minute!" Joshua's voice called from somewhere inside the house, probably the living room. There was a lot of noise as Joshua put down art supplies and headed to the front door. A smirk crawled onto Alec's face as Quip slipped subtly behind him as the door was thrown open to reveal Joshua's enormous heights.

"Alec!" Joshua exclaimed, beaming a huge, welcoming smile.

Alec had to smile back; Joshua's moods were always infectious. "Hey, Josh, what's up?"

"Painting, many things, many Joshuas," the dog-man said, stepping back from the doorway. He grabbed Alec's arm and pulled him toward the house. "Show you everything, come."

Quip backed up as her shield was removed and flashed Alec a panicked look before Joshua noticed her. She froze, not moving a muscle. There was a moment of pause where she stared at Joshua and Joshua stared back at her. Joshua's eyes widened with visible panic.

"Joshua, this is—" Alec reached out to Joshua, already trying to calm him down, but Joshua stepped backward, colliding with the door. Letting out a strangled howl, Joshua covered his face and looked frantically at Alec through the slits between his fingers.

"Little girl? You brought little girl?" Joshua shook his head rapidly and disappeared into the house, slamming the door in their faces. "No, no, no screaming!"

Quip grabbed Alec's hand, and her grip wasn't loose; it felt like she was going to break his hand into pieces. He squeezed her hand back. "It's okay, all right?" He turned back to closed door and rapped his knuckles against the decaying wood, hoping Joshua hadn't fled to the basement or something. "Hey, Joshua, it's okay, man. This is Quip, she's Manticore too!"

There was a long pause, and then the door rattled and opened an inch. "Prove it!"

Alec looked down at Quip. The seven-year-old sighed before turning around. She pulled her jacket and shirt down from her barcode, exposing it so Joshua could see. The door opened slowly, carefully. Joshua peered down at the small barcode and then looked up at Alec.

"It's not a fake," Alec said.

"No, no fake," Joshua replied. He stepped back and opened the door wide open, now smiling uncertainly at Quip. "Come in."

Alec started to walk inside, his hands on Quip's shoulders. The X8 let him guide her into the house before she pulled away, looking around as if she needed to know all the escape routes. He vaguely remembered doing something similar the first time he had come here. She stayed close to him as he followed Joshua into the living room where he had his easel set up. There were paintings sitting around the room, a lot more than there had been the last time Alec had been there. He walked through the collection, wondering where he could fence the excess. Joshua needed to keep a large variety of paint and stuff, right?

"Newest Joshua," the transhuman said, motioning to the easel. It was a bright painting, mostly pinks and oranges with a few dashes of yellow. He looked down at Quip who looked like a three-year-old compared to the almost seven foot tall transgenic. She didn't even come up to his hips. "You like it?"

Quip looked at the painting and then back at Joshua, her expression showing something like a determination to not be afraid. "It looks nice. Like a flower."

Alec glanced at the painting again and then tilted his head to the side. Yeah, actually, it could look like a flower. If you threw the flower in a blender. Maybe.

Joshua nodded and patted the top of the easel. "Flowers nice." He glanced down, his head bobbing. "What's your name?"

"Quip," she said.

"She's my clone," Alec said, straightening up from where he was perusing some of the artwork. Joshua nodded, understanding that line of thought from having spent so much time in Manticore.

Quip shot a glare at Alec. "I am _not_ a clone!"

"Fine, you're a midget-like, girly, kiddy version of me," Alec said, shrugging his shoulders. She looked like she wanted to stick her tongue out him but had decided the action was too childish. He turned toward Joshua who was, yet again, staring at Quip. "Could you keep an eye on her today, Josh? We're sort of in a bind here, and I have to be at work."

"Max at work too?" Joshua asked, somehow ripping his gaze away from Quip.

Alec nodded. "Yeah, we're both working. So, can you do it? All you have to do is give her some crayons and paper, and she'll be fine."

Quip scowled and put her hands on her hips. "You're not funny."

Alec snickered and ruffled her hair as he walked up to her. She shoved his hand away and moved toward the shelves of books on the nearby wall; out of the corner of her eyes, she kept a watch on Joshua. Paranoid little thing. He would've done the same thing.

"Where did tiny fella come from?" Joshua asked, pointing toward Quip.

"Showed up at my apartment on Monday night," Alec said, "She's sort of in trouble, but Logan thinks he's going to get her out of it and play the hero at the same time." He resituated his messenger bag on his shoulder. "She'll be in town for a few more days, then she's going to get a real white-picket-fence, cookies and cake family."

"Oh," Joshua said. He nodded. "A family is good. Need family."

"Yeah, whatever." Alec patted Joshua on the shoulder. "I'll be back around five. Just don't let her go running off into traffic or anything, and oh, yeah, feed her at lunch and all that stuff."

"We eat dinner together?" Joshua said, smiling hopefully.

Alec smirked. "Sure, buddy, we can do that. Mac and cheese?"

"Mac and cheese and beanie weenies!" Joshua echoed, giving Alec a thumbs up. "We eat dinner together, like family."

"Sure, big guy," Alec said. He turned toward the shelves to find Quip flipping through a book in her hands. It was an old, brown book that he probably could have taken to a black market for cash, but Joshua would not let him have any of them. They were Sandeman's so Joshua was sort of possessive over them. The one Quip was holding was titled _The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_. Whoever that was. "What's that? Kiddy stories?"

Quip closed the book and held it to her chest. "No. I don't know what they are."

"Poems," Joshua said, "Nice words." He gestured towards the easel. "Pretty, like paintings."

Looking down at the book again, Quip ran her fingers over the glossy title. "I'll read them."

"You do that," Alec said. He glanced down at his watch. "Shit, I'm gonna be late." He swept Quip up with minor protests on her part and stood her on the seat of an arm chair so they were eye level. "Do me a favor, short stack, and just stay in the house today, all right?"

When she crossed her arms and just looked at him, he rubbed his hand over his mouth, trying to find the right things to say. "I know you can handle yourself and everything, but when organized crime units are after you, I've found it's best to lay low. Understand? Besides, if anything happened to you, Max would have my ass on a silver platter."

"Max wouldn't," Joshua said as he watched them. "Max is nice."

"Yeah, to you," Alec muttered. He turned his attention back to Quip. "So, can you do that for me? For my ass? It's a good ass, I promise, lots of women like it, and I'd really like to keep it where it is."

A half-smile darted across Quip's expression at the joke before she gave a grudging nod. "Fine. But you need to bring ice cream to dinner."

"Fair deal," he said, extending his hand to her. They shook on it, and Quip jumped down out of the seat of the chair. "Later guys!" Alec headed out of the living room and toward the door, mapping out a route in his mind that was the quickest way to Jam Pony. Normal was going to be pissed…

"Alec?"

He turned around and saw Quip standing in the hallway behind him. She was looking at her feet, her hands fidgeting in front of her.

"Yeah, squirt?"

"Be careful," she mumbled almost inaudibly.

Alec grinned at her. "Now where's the fun in that?" When she looked up at him with worried hazel eyes, he shook his head, sighing. "But, since you're so demanding, I guess I might try a little harder."

She smiled a little. "Good."


	15. Chapter 15

For the first few, very boring, hours of the day, Joshua and Quip sat in the living room, both pretending to read books while they sized each other up. Joshua smelled like paint, wet earth, cheese and something warm that she didn't recognize; it was a good smell altogether but unfamiliar. Quip didn't really know what to think of the big, giant dog-man. She had heard about people like him while she had been at Manticore; experiments that had gone wrong or didn't make Renfro and the others happy, so they got thrown into the Basement. Quip had only been in the basement once, and she didn't remember seeing Joshua there...

Lowering her book just a little, she glanced over the top of it, sneaking yet another look. She caught his curious gaze and jerked her eyes away. Nope, never seen anything like him.

A few more silent minutes passed, and then he cleared his throat, making her jump a little.

"Quip like the poems?" he asked.

She nodded. He was looking at her over the top of his novel, a brown one with _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ plastered on the front of its cracked cover. None of those words really made sense to Quip, except she knew that Tom was a name. She realized that Joshua was mimicking the exact way she had glanced at him a few minutes ago, but she didn't know whether to be amused or frown at him.

"Good," he said, giving an official-looking nod, "Poems are good."

"Mhmm."

He put down his book on the arm of the chair he was sitting in and stood up. Quip unintentionally moved farther back into the corner she nestled in. He was really, really big, and since she was sitting on the floor, he looked enormous. But she shouldn't be afraid, Alec said so…and he wouldn't lie to her. But still, she watched the dog-man as he walked across the room to the wooden thing with a painting on it and picked up the slender paintbrush that was lying on the ledge. He glanced at her again before turning to the side and dipping the brush into an open can of paint. It came out yellow, brighter than any yellow she had seen before.

She stared as he swished the brush across the painting, leaving an impossibly bright trail of color behind the thick bristles. Joshua dashed the brush the other way, dragging it through the pink and orange swirls. Quip closed her book and leaned forward so she could see the easel better.

What was he doing? The painting looked fine before, or she thought it had. Alec didn't seem to like it…well, she did, and that was all that really mattered. Right?

"You like painting?" Joshua asked. His question interrupted her thoughts.

She shrugged. "I don't know. Never tried."

Joshua looked down at the brush in his hands as a slow smile scrawled over his face. "Then time to try." He held out the brush to her. A drop of yellow paint fell off the tip and splashed onto the floor.

Quip looked suspiciously at the brush then up at the dog-man before getting to her feet. As usual, the quickly healing wound on her side ached when her skin stretched, but she was getting better at ignoring the pain and, besides, the medicine was still dulling the ache.

Her eyes locked on his, she walked up to the big man, stopping when she was a few, safe feet away. He held out the paint brush a little farther and smiled.

"You try."

She reached out and took the paint brush from him, her hand landing on the wooden handle. Cool paint splashed off the end and stuck to her skin, creating a small splotch of yellow on her wrist. She poked at it with her pointer finger of her left hand.

"What do I do?" she asked. She glanced over at the painting that was sitting on the wooden thing. He didn't want her to paint on that, did he? That was his, not hers.

Joshua walked over and gingerly picked up the painting on the wooden thing. He treated it more delicately than he seemed capable of as he moved it to the side and set it on ground so that it was leaning against a bookcase. Grinning, he reached over and picked up a small blank painting and put it back on the wooden thing. He looked at her for a moment, then walked over and picked up the footrest near the arm chair he had been sitting in. He sat the footrest in front of the painting and then turned back to her.

"Tiny fella paint whatever she wants with colors she wants," he said, motioning to the painting. On the small table beside it, there were a lot of open paint cans, which were probably the colors Joshua was talking about.

"But what do I paint?" she asked. She stepped up onto the footrest, guessing that was why Joshua had put it there. The painting was very blank, and she couldn't think of how the paint on the end of her brush was going to make something good appear on the whiteness.

"Whatever," Joshua said, spreading his arms wide, "Anything."

Quip bit her lip and turned back to the empty painting. The yellow paint was now ominous on the end of her paint brush, as if it was taunting her. Scowling, Quip dashed the paint across the blankness, creating a yellow stripe where she didn't particularly want there to be one. She blinked and stared at it for a moment before looking up at Joshua. "I ruined it."

"No," Joshua said, shaking his head vigorously. He waved his hand over the painting. "This. This is art. Keep painting."

Quip frowned as she turned back to the artwork-to-be. Maybe she could fix it… She poked the brush at the yellow line, stretching it out until finally it was a yellow blob on the canvas. It sort of looked like the sun, she guessed. She splashed some more yellow across the canvas, creating lines that drew out from the sun, before she reached over and dipped her brush into the light blue paint near her elbow.

When she was finished about an hour later, she had to admit that it wasn't a very interesting painting. There was the big yellow sun-blob with some spindly sun rays coming off of it, then a bunch of blue colors around it to make up the sky.

"You finished?" Joshua asked.

"Uh-huh." She turned around to see the big transgenic standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a stack of white-bread sandwiches in his hands. He walked toward her until he stopped beside the footrest she was still standing on. He motioned to painting and then smiled at her.

"Colors, very good, nice choices." He nodded and then gestured towards the sun in the middle. "Needs more…movement."

Quip stared at the painting. How was she supposed to give something 2D movement? It wasn't possible… But when she looked at Joshua's paintings that dotted the living room, they did have something extra that hers didn't have. What that was, she didn't know, but she knew she didn't have it.

As she climbed down off the footstool, he handed her one of the sandwiches. "PB and J. Good for you, and tasty too."

Quip nodded, remembering the acronym from her months spent traveling between shelters and orphanages, neither of which actually did their job very well anymore. She sat down on the stool and munched on the sticky, gooey sandwich.

"You like painting?" Joshua asked. He had already devoured two sandwiches and had moved onto his third while Quip picked at hers. Obviously, he had the same eating abilities as Alec.

"I guess…" she said, glancing up at the painting behind her, "I'm not good like you, though."

"Practice," Joshua said before he shoved an entire sandwich into his mouth. Quip giggled as he tried to talk and keep the sandwich in his mouth at the same time. "Mu paf muh, g'effa."

"Huh?" she asked, still grinning.

Joshua swallowed the rest of the sandwich and grinned at her, specks of jelly, bread and peanut butter sticking to his lips and face. "You paint more, get better."

"All right…" Quip said, but she didn't think she was going to get a lot better. She nibbled on her sandwich and looked around the room at all of Joshua's paintings. She had never seen so much artwork in one place, ever. "You really like painting, don't you?"

"Yes," he said with relish. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. "Much. Feel best when painting. Feel…very good." His smile was content and at ease; not a smile that Quip was really used to.

He suddenly stood up and hurried over to her. His monstrously large right hand took hers and carefully pulled her off the stool, leading her away from the living room and into another room, this one with even rattier furniture. His hand engulfed hers, making it disappear within his own gentle grip. "Show Quip favorite for now!" he said, his excitement seeping over to her.

She let him tug her over to a corner of the room, right below a window that let in murky Seattle sunlight. There was a large painting there. It was covered in a bunch of colors, more than Quip thought that Joshua had. Parts of the painting were dark while other parts were light, some were swirled, others jagged, but somehow, amazingly, all the parts worked together.

"This is family," Joshua said. He tapped a swirled blue and dark purple part of the painting. "This is Max…" His finger trailed over the top of the painting to rest against the dark orange section that was right up against the blue/purple part. "And Logan…" The next part the finger tapped on was dark red with a couple of dark yellow patches. "And this is Alec."

Quip tilted her head to the side, trying to understand how these colors represented those people and how they were all a family. She didn't know much about families, except that they were supposed to have a mother and father and a kid, or so she'd heard from people at the orphanages and shelters. And Logan had found her a family…but there was one right here, or so Joshua said.

Joshua pointed to a little black square underneath the Alec-splotch. "Quip can go here, if she wants."

Quip blinked up at Joshua uncertainly then looked down at the floor. "I'd like that. I think."

There was a moment of silence while they both looked at the painting, and then Joshua made a low humming noise.

"Like Alec...but not Alec. At all." He poked her in the shoulder, so she looked up at him. It was like craning her head back to look at a skyscraper. "Quip not painter, not yet. Might know what Quip is."

"I'm an X8," she replied. She thought that was pretty self-explanatory, especially after he had seen her barcode, but maybe he couldn't read the numbers? A subtle shiver went up her spine as she remembered her own lessons in memorizing barcodes, a process that had taken place in a chair in Psy-Ops…

Grinning, the dog-man headed out of the room, motioning for her to follow him. "No, Quip's more. Come, I show you something." He stopped in the hallway and opened a door, revealing a set of stairs leading down. A cool, dank scent rose from the dimly lit underground.

Quip hesitated at the top of the stairs as Joshua clattered halfway down the stairs. He turned back around and held a hand out to her.

"Quip like it. Promise."

She could hear the smile and enthusiasm in his voice, and her hand moved almost involuntarily to place itself in his again. Joshua…Joshua was a safe person.


	16. Chapter 16

"Yo, I'm back!" Alec called as he stepped into Joshua's house, the front door creaking as he pressed on it. Outside, the sun was starting to set somewhere behind the clouds; the two things Seattle never lacked were clouds and rain, and tonight they were both in abundance.

The house was quiet, which was weird because Joshua usually had some kind of music playing. Alec walked into the living room, his senses on the alert for any movement or noise. It wasn't like they could go out anywhere, not with Joshua. Having a dog-face and being as tall as a pro-basketball player sort of excluded you from being able to go out into the real world with ease. And the house wasn't ransacked so he threw out the break-in option. So where were they?

"Quip?" he called, moving toward the kitchen, his hand slipping into the pocket of his jacket where he kept a gun. The stove wasn't on, and there was nothing cooking. All right, so someone had stolen Josh and Quip and dinner? Like hell they did… "Josh?"

There was suddenly noise, loud, creaking stairs as something big hurried up them. "Coming, Alec!"

Alec sighed and removed his hand from his pocket just as the transhuman thundered into the room. Joshua threw a look over his shoulder and then grinned at Alec, one of those wide, teeth-showing smiles of his. "Finish work?"

"No, just got bored and decided to take a break," Alec teased.

Joshua frowned and rocked back on his heels. "Max wouldn't like that…"

"It was a joke, Dog-boy," Alec said, rolling his eyes. He pulled off his jacket and threw it across one of the chairs around the kitchen table. Turning back toward Joshua, he spread his hands out. "Where'd you stuff the kid?"

"Nowhere," Joshua answered quickly, shrugging and lifting his chin stubbornly. "No stuffing Quip anywhere."

Alec raised an eyebrow. "All right." He waited, expecting Joshua to say where Quip was, but the transhuman was only glancing down at him as if waiting for a reaction. "So...where is she?"

"Somewhere," Joshua replied. He walked over and started rummaging through the cabinets, pulling out a box of macaroni and cheese and a couple cans of beanie weenies. Putting those down on the counter, he grabbed a couple pots out of the dish drain and put them on the stove.

Alec nodded slowly. "Okay..." Maybe Josh and Quip were playing a game. Or maybe the big guy had accidentally hurt her… He stared at Joshua for a moment. The transhuman didn't look guilty, and he wasn't moping about in remorse, which was what Alec guessed he would do if he hurt the X8. "She didn't go out by herself, did she?"

"No, Quip in Father's house," Joshua said cryptically. He grabbed a can-opener and attacked one of the cans of beanie weenies. "Not let her go out." He gestured at the dirty window with the can-opener. "Not safe."

Alec nodded. All right, so Quip was still in here. Joshua had come up from the basement, so maybe that's where Quip was hiding out? Leaving Joshua to his stove, Alec went down the hall and stopped next to the doorway to the basement. The door was closed, but the lights were on downstairs.

"Alec like shell-shape macaroni or little bowties?" Joshua called from the kitchen.

"Shells are cool," Alec replied. He didn't really know how the pasta shape could make a difference, but whatever, shells were better than bowties.

After a couple moments of listening at the doorway and hearing nothing, he decided to go investigate hands-on. He opened the door, and it squeaked in rusty protest. Judging on looks, this whole house should be coming down around their ears, but for some reason it was stubbornly still standing.

He looked around the basement, wondering where Quip was. There was so much crap down here, boxes and boxes of antiques that would probably bring in lots of cash if he ever got the urge to go through all of it. Quip was probably playing dress-ups with a box of clothes from the 80s or investigating a stamp collection or... Something clicked in his mind, and he headed toward a back corner of the basement that he had discovered a few months ago.

Of course. Where else would she be?

Quip was sitting cross-legged on the bench in front of the piano with a thin, floppy book open in her lap. Her grey hat was hanging from the corner of the piano, as if she was staking her claim on the instrument. Her nose twitched, and she jerked her head up, her lower lip jutting out in a pout.

"Hey! It was supposed to be a surprise!" she exclaimed, pulling the book closer to herself. A quick telescoped glance across the open pages told him that it was an intermediate-level practice book for the piano.

Alec stared at her, unsure of what to say. He was getting used to the idea of having a miniature copy of himself, hell, it was even amusing sometimes, but it was sort of freakish that she might have picked up his knack for the piano. Was she really that similar to him?

Quip seemed to be uncertain as well. She closed the book and shoved her hair back behind her ears, glancing at him with her hazel eyes. "Joshua said you can play, and he thought I might like it too." She thrust out her chin. "I'm better at it than painting."

"You tried painting?" Alec asked as he approached the bench, looking from Quip to the piano. He hadn't touched this thing since that night last fall, but Joshua had remembered that he could play it. The big guy was more perceptive than anyone gave him credit for.

Quip nodded. "Yeah, but I'm no good." She poked at one of the sleek piano keys. "I'm okay at the piano though." She handed the book in her lap to him. "I'm already on this one."

He took the book, his gaze not focusing on the little black marks. "When did you start…"

"A few hours ago," she replied. She blinked up at him. "Am I doing all right? I'm at the beginning of this book, but Joshua thinks I'm learning a lot."

Shit, yeah, she was doing all right if she was already at an intermediate level after just a few hours of playing. It had taken him only a day and a half to master the piano under intensive training at Manticore; he didn't really doubt that Manticore had spiced up their cocktails, as Max called them, with a little extra virtuoso.

Sighing, he grabbed Quip and gently slid her over so he could sit down beside her on the piano bench. "So, what can you play, small fry?"

He watched while her little fingers danced over the keys, playing a complicated melody. After a few moments of her playing, he recognized the tune. He had taught it to Rachel a long time ago…His fingers twitched across his thigh, playing the harmony.

When she was finished, Quip sat back and glanced up at him. "What is it? Did I play it wrong?"

"What're you talking about?"

"I dunno," she said, shrugging her thin shoulders and poking at a black key, "You smell sad."

Alec rolled his eyes. The kid could smell his emotions now? X8s had the best noses in Manticore, but he didn't think it was that good.

"You play fine. I was just thinking about something." When it looked like she was going to ask him what that "something" was, he cut her off by leaning over and putting his hands on the keys. "Come on, let's play something together."

"Really?" Quip asked, a quirky smile lighting up her face, "What do you want to play? I don't know much."

"I'll teach you," he said, smirking back at her, "How's that?"

"All right, but nothing too hard," she replied.

"Nothing too hard. Promise."


	17. Chapter 17

Quip followed Alec through a couple songs; he started with easy ones and moved to a couple harder ones. She kept up with him as well as she could, but her fingers weren't as long as his, and she wasn't entirely sure of herself, like he was. Alec already knew all the songs, and it looked like he didn't even really have to think about them to be able to play them.

She slowly stopped playing and just watched him, letting him play solo. His eyes were closed and there was a concentrated grimace on his face, the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown. He almost looked in pain, but the music he was playing was beautiful, so much better than anything she had poked out of the piano so far.

Suddenly he stopped playing and threw her a wry look. "What, didn't think I noticed you stopped?"

"Sorry," she said, putting her fingers back on the keys again, "You're just…"

When she trailed off, he raised an eyebrow at her. "What?"

"You're really good," she said. He was way, way better than she was. She turned around on the seat and looked up at him. "When did you learn how to play?"

His right hand drifted across the keys, playing a sad little melody. He didn't look at her; instead, he trained his eyes on the piano front. "A few years ago."

"Manticore taught you how to play the piano?" Quip asked, confused. That didn't sound like something Manticore would do, since Alec obviously liked the piano in some weird, twisted way. "Why?"

He chewed on the inside of his cheek and narrowed his eyes, his hand pausing over the keys. Grinning with his normal happy-go-lucky look, he turned towards her. "Come on, small fry, Joshua's probably finished with dinner." He slid off the bench and snatched her hat off the corner of the piano. "Let's go." Waving the hat in front of her, he blurred away and up the stairs, taking the hat with him.

"Hey!" Quip tore after him, leaving the piano and the discussion behind for now. She was a kid, but she was also pretty smart, and she knew when someone was avoiding something. And he stole her hat! She blurred up the stairs and nearly slammed into Alec's legs, but he caught her just as she was darting to avoid him. He yanked her up and held her with one arm wrapped around her; the other hand, a traitor to her trust, attacked her exposed side.

Quip screamed with surprise and laughter. What the hell was _that_?! She felt like she couldn't do anything but laugh and flail as the weird sensation spread over her side wherever Alec's fingers brushed her. She had never felt anything like it in her seven short years.

"No, _hehehe_ , Alec, stop!" she cried through the laughter as she tried to squirm out of his grip. "Wh- _hehe_ -what are you doing?!"

"Damn, you're ticklish," he said without relenting, "I didn't think they made us this sensitive."

"Nooo, come, _haha_ , on!" Quip gasped. What did ticklish mean?! She didn't want to be whatever it was anymore. "Alec!"

"Quip!" he replied in a high-pitched mock of her own voice.

Her eyes were starting to water, but at the moment, she couldn't think of any evasive procedures. Her mind was shot with laughter and giggling, much to her own dismay.

"When I let her stay with you, I didn't think you were going to torture her," said an amused feminine voice.

Quip felt Alec's grip slip for a moment, probably in surprise, then tighten. He turned around and let Quip's feet touch the ground as Max came into view, leaning against the doorway to the kitchen with a half-smile on her face.

"Darn, Max, and I just started," Alec said, "After this, I was going to let her watch cartoons and eat chocolate bars." He snapped his fingers and shook his head. "But now that you've caught me, I guess I should let her go with you and eat vegetables and watch educational movies."

Max rolled her eyes. "You know, sometimes I think you're actually trying to be funny." She smiled over at Quip. "Hey, home girl, you all right?"

Quip nodded. Her hand darted out and snatched her hat back from Alec; she put it on her head and then grinned up at him. "I'm all right."

"Hey…" Alec said, shoving her gently towards the kitchen. "Go see if Joshua needs help."

Quip glanced from Alec to Max and then trudged into the kitchen, skirting past Max. She kept her ears listening in on the conversation that was probably going to take place in the other room.

"Who invited you?" Alec asked, his voice kept carefully at a joking level.

"Joshua," Max replied, "Stopped by to make sure you hadn't killed the kid yet."

"Sorry to disappoint."

"Look, I knew you'd be here, and Logan asked me to do something for him."

"How many favors does that guy have on you, Max?"

"It's not a favor—"

She might as well have stayed in the room, she could hear their fighting so clearly. Unlike the other X-series, X8s, or at least Quip's group of X8s, were made more for spy missions instead of combat, so all five senses were heightened as much as they could be. Sometimes the DNA backfired, and in Manticore, she had seen at least three of her team's members experience sensory overload. They had all been dragged off, and they had never been returned to the barracks.

Her nose picked up on a new scent that had been previously masked by the heavy smells of cheese and cooking meat, and she whipped around to see a dark-skinned lady sitting at the kitchen table, cutting up some kind of vegetable. Quip backed toward Joshua and the stove, her eyes trained on the woman at the table.

The lady looked up and quirked an eyebrow at Quip. "What's with the look, baby boo? Never seen a sister cut an onion before?"

Joshua turned and grinned down at Quip. "Original Cindy," he said, as if that was some sort of explanation. The name sounded familiar, and she remembered Max mentioning something about this woman. Quip glanced back at the woman before scooting closer to Joshua. It wasn't that she couldn't take this person on by herself, it was just that she liked being close to the big dog-guy.

"Hey, OC knew you'd like the tops," the woman said, smirking over at her. When Quip said nothing, she pointed to her curly-haired head. "The hat, baby boo. Nice style." She tilted her head, her gaze on Quip's face. "And damn, girl, you sure you not Alec's kid? You look just like him."

"Not his," Quip answered quietly, "I'm a prototype."

"That so," the woman said, looking Quip over with some strange emotion in her eyes. "Look more like a little girl to me." She stood up from the table with a lot of grace for a human and walked over to the oven. "Watch yourself, Joshua."

"Sorry, OC," Joshua said as he moved out of the way. He smiled down at Quip. "OC is Max's BFF."

The woman, Original Cindy, gave a snort of laughter as she dumped the onion bits into the pot of beanie weenie things. "I told you not to listen to those ghetto kids outside. Don't learn nothing good from mouths like that."

"Nothing good," Joshua echoed as he stirred the pot of macaroni vigorously.

Original Cindy sighed and leaned back against the counter. "Boy, we gotta work on your dinner options."

"Mac and cheese and beanie weenies no good?" he asked, lifting the spoon from the pot.

"They're good, but you gotta eat more than that," she said, "Can't have proper dinner parties if you keep feeding us the same thing each time."

"Ham hocks next time," Joshua said. He gave a firm nod and turned his attention to stirring the macaroni again.

"Sure, Doggy-dog," Original Cindy said, patting him on the arm. She glanced past him at Quip. "You still ogling? OC don't bite, baby boo, less you give me good reason." She smiled at Quip and walked back over to the table. "Come on, you can help with the greens, work some for your dinner." She rolled her eyes as she grabbed a couple carrots that were sitting with a few other vegetables. "Then maybe you won't turn out so much like Super Boy, think it all falls in your lap like a fifty cent chick on a Friday night."

Quip stared at Original Cindy, trying to comprehend the extremely difficult speech pattern that the woman was using. Most of the words Quip knew, but the way the older woman used them was terribly confusing. Uncertainly, she walked over to the table and sat down across from her, watching her to see what she wanted done.

"One thing's sure, you're quieter than that motor-mouth," Original Cindy said. She pushed the head of lettuce toward Quip. "Pull that apart and put it in the bowl, would you? I've got carrots to cut, and there's no more help around here worth the time it takes to tell them what to do."

Still hesitant, Quip took the lettuce and started pulling the leaves off, one by one, before she dropped them into the bowl.

"Don't worry about Quip, OC," Joshua said, "She's quiet, then talks later."

"Guessed that, Joshua," Original Cindy said, tossing a wry look over at Joshua. She turned her attention back towards the carrots but seemed to be talking to Quip. "I get you, baby boo. If you're anything like what else Manticore's screwed up…" She shook her head. "I ain't worried about waiting, you'll talk when you feel like it."

Quip didn't say anything, but she kept pulling the lettuce apart since that's what Original Cindy had asked her to do, and she didn't mind doing it.

"Not the whites," Original Cindy said, picking out a piece of white lettuce that Quip had thrown into the bowl.

"Why not?" Quip asked, flicking her eyes up at the woman.

Original Cindy smirked. "Cause it just ain't good. Stick with the green stuff, you'll like it better."

Quip nodded, not entirely convinced, but willing to except the excuse. There was so much about this world outside of Manticore that she just didn't know about. She had spent the last half year on the outside, but there was no end to the amount of knowledge she was supposed to be memorizing. She almost felt sorry for normal humans and their memories; she wouldn't know what to do if she didn't have an eidetic memory.

A few minutes later, Max and Alec walked through the door, bringing an air of hostility with them. Alec glanced toward Quip and then looked away abruptly, making the X8 confused. What had Max said to him? It seemed like all they ever did was fight…

"Hey, Quip, wanna come with me for a minute?" Max asked. Quip had a feeling that it wasn't really an option to say no, but she looked over at Original Cindy, wondering if she could use the excuse of preparing salad.

"It's a'ight, I can enlist Soldier Boy," the human woman said, throwing a pointed look over at Alec.

Alec made a face at her. "'Cause salad-making is high on my list of qualifications."

"Was that backtalk?" Original Cindy asked, and Quip thought that she probably wouldn't be a good person to go against.

"Go on, Quip," Alec said, sighing as he jerked his head toward Max, "It won't take long."

Quip slid out of her chair, her eyes on Alec, but he was looking away again, a fake smile on his face. He walked past her and sat down in the chair she had been in, grabbing the head of lettuce and ripping into it.

Max led Quip out of the kitchen and out onto the decaying porch out front. She sat down on the stoop while Quip wandered around, unsure of what Max wanted to talk about. "Quip, c'mere."

Quip sat down beside Max, her elbows resting on her knees. She blinked up at the woman, wondering if Logan was going to have something else for her to do.

"Nice night, huh?" Max said, looking out at the street.

Quip shrugged. It seemed like every other night to her; nothing much changed in Seattle. It rained, people had bad luck, it rained some more. "I guess."

Max shoved her long hair back behind her ears and looked over at Quip. "So, you okay with Alec? He hasn't tried to give you alcohol or let you watch…weird things on TV?"

"No, just chocolate and waffles," Quip said, hoping that wouldn't get Alec in trouble. "And other stuff."

Max nodded. "That's good."

A long moment of silence passed, and Quip tapped her feet on the step. "Can I go back inside now?"

Max smiled. "Actually, I was wondering if you'd like to talk to your new family." When Quip stared at her, she elaborated. "The one in Canada, remember? You'll be heading up there right after the trial, since that'll be safest for you."

Oh. Yeah. The Canada people. Quip had almost forgotten about them. "Aren't they in Canada?" Nervous, she glanced around, half expecting them to come out the shadows and up into the yard to claim her.

"Cell phone, remember?" Max said, holding up the little portable phone. She handed it to Quip, who guessed she could get about twenty bucks for a working cell phone on the market back over in Sector 12… But this was Max's and therefore not for fencing. "All you have to do is press send."

"What if they don't answer?" Quip said. She looked up from the little glowing screen at Max.

"They will," she replied, smiling, "They're waiting for the call. Their names are Kensie and Terrence Pierson."

Quip sat down on the bottom step of the porch stoop and pressed the call button. It started ringing a couple seconds later. She trailed her finger across the step, making looping designs in the dirt. She didn't really want to talk to these people…

On the third ring, someone picked up the phone. "Hello?"A woman's voice. She had a weird accent, but it wasn't unpleasant. "Hello, is anyone there?"

"I'm here," Quip said, guessing that was the proper reply. She had never really had a phone conversation before; she had never held a phone until getting out of Manticore, and there really hadn't been a need to call anyone after that.

"Oh, and who is this?" the voice asked. In the background, Quip could hear noises, possibly a TV or a radio or maybe other people.

"Um, I'm Quip," she said, glancing up at Max for some sort of reassurance that she was doing this right. Max smiled at her as the woman on the end of the line burst into chatter.

"Is that really you, sweetheart?" the woman exclaimed, sounding genuinely excited and kind, "It's so good to hear your voice! Logan's been telling us all about you. How are you?"

Quip drummed her toe slowly against the ground. What had Logan been telling them? He hadn't told them that she was a Manticore-brand assassin-in-training, that was for sure. No one talked to a science experiment like that unless you were another science experiment, maybe.

"I'm all right," Quip said, "Alec's taking care of me." It was true, he was.

"Who's Alec?" the woman asked, "Is that your social worker?"

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned around to see Max nodding at her. "Um, yeah," Quip said, "That's him." What was a social worker?

"Good for him," the woman said, "I'll certainly have to thank him some time. Hold on, let me go get Terrence, he'll want to talk to you too."

"Okay," Quip said. There was a soft clunk, probably the woman putting the phone down, then footsteps walking away while she called out her husband's name. Quip hoped that maybe the phone line would die before she got back…but a few seconds later, there were two people speaking to her.

"Hello, Quip," said a male voice. That must have been the husband. "Fairing well down there in the States, I hope?"

"Yes, sir," Quip answered, guessing that was the proper address for an older man.

"That's good to hear," he said, "It's nice to finally get to speak to you. Now, how about you tell us about yourself? What do you like to do?"

What was she supposed to say? Somehow 'surviving' didn't seem like the right answer. "I like…reading. And playing the piano. And being outside." Those were all true. Back at Manticore, she had relished the times when their superiors let them go out into the forests, no matter what was happening out there. Going to get shot at? Whatever, as long as she was out in the woods and away from those blue hallways and sterile rooms.

"Well, we've got all of the above here," said the woman, "Terrence here plays the piano, and there's a library in town. We've got a big backyard here, all ready for you to explore, if that's what you'd like."

"And other kids to play with," said the man, "It's a good neighborhood, you'll like the Kopecki kids. They've got a boy your age, and a girl that isn't too much older."

"There'll be enough for you to do around the house, too," the woman jumped in again. "Terrence and I were thinking about getting a dog soon, and we'd like you to help pick it out when you get here, all right, sweetheart?"

"Okay," Quip said, feeling more and more uncomfortable. These people sounded like they really wanted her to come and stay with them, but Quip didn't want to go to Canada. They sounded like nice people, but she knew they were going to find out somehow about what she was, and then they wouldn't be so nice to her anymore. They wouldn't want her if they knew…

Quip heard the hinges on the door creak, and she caught a whiff of Alec's scent as the door opened. She turned around, trying not to look like she needed rescuing.

"Joshua says dinner's ready," he said, glancing from Max to her, "You done yet?"

"Quip? Are you still there?" the man on the phone asked.

"Yeah, um, I have to go eat dinner," she said. She looked back at Max, wondering what she was supposed to do with the cell phone.

"Oh, all right," said the woman, "It was great to finally talk to you."

"Yep, you sound like a sweet girl," said the man, "You take care of yourself, and we'll see you next week, okay?"

"Yes, sir."

"Goodbye, then."

"Bye." Quip closed the phone and handed it to Max before scurrying up the steps to stand beside Alec.

"They sound really nice," Max said as she stood up and put the phone in her pocket. Quip saw her look at Alec, but Alec didn't look back at her.

Quip nodded. Sure, they sounded nice now… Max probably understood, but she just didn't want to acknowledge it. She had spent way more time in the world than Quip had; Alec had told her about how Max was one of those mythical 09ers, the group of Manticore escapees that Quip and her team had only whispered about when all the lights were off and the superiors were far, far away. Max had to know that people didn't like it when you were different since Quip had learned that a few days after getting out of Manticore.

"Like 'em?" Alec said shortly. He forced a smile at her as he held the door open for her and Max. He must have known about who the phone call had been for.

Quip shrugged. "I guess. I dunno."

"Food!" Joshua yelled from the house, his voice carrying easily out onto the porch. "Hungry!"

"Let's go before he starts eating the table cloth," Alec said, heading inside and still ignoring the fact that Max was staring him down. Quip snickered at the mental image and darted in ahead of Alec, grabbing his hand on the way to pull him along with her.


	18. Chapter 18

Alec rifled through the drawers in his kitchen, looking for his black gloves. Last time he had gotten back from a, er, job, he had taken them off in the kitchen. Somehow they had disappeared. His photographic memory wasn't being helpful at the moment, and he was going to chalk that up as a good ol' Manticore glitch.

"Why can't I go with you?" Quip asked. She was sitting on the kitchen counter that looked out into the living room, frowning at him with a serious pout on the side.

"I already told you no, Quip," Alec said as he slammed another drawer shut.

It was Thursday night, and Krenski and his lackeys were getting that drug shipment in. Logan had said that Matt Sung and his people were going to be there, but Alec and Max were going in as covert back-up. Knowing the superb and spectacular group of cops that this city employed, Alec was fairly certain that transgenic services were going to be needed.

"But I could help, I know what he looks like," Quip insisted, "And what he smells like. And I'll find him faster than you will." She slid her legs over the side of the counter and stared at him, daring him to contradict her. "I should get to go."

"I know what he looks like too," Alec said as he yanked open a cabinet. Logan had some grainy pictures and a couple descriptions from victims, including Quip. That was good enough for him. "And I'm pretty sure we can find him without using you as a GPS."

"But that's what I'm supposed to do," argued Quip, her eyes widening. She slipped off the counter and stomped over to lean against the refrigerator. Glowering, she crossed her thin arms over her chest. "I'm a tracker and recon, I should get to go!"

Alec closed the cabinet and turned around to look at her. She had valid points, but above everything, she was just a kid and if she needed a cherry on top of his refusal, he could always point out that she was still healing up from the gunshot wound. However, he would rather just pretend not to hear her complaints. "Find my gloves, will you?"

"Will you let me come with you if I do?" she asked, tapping one little sneakered foot.

"Gloves, now." She didn't move. "Please."

Letting out an aggravated huff, Quip shoved herself away from the fridge and stomped over to a drawer above one of his liquor cabinets. Oh, yeah, that one. She pulled it open, snatched out his gloves and tossed them to him. Damn, but she did have a good nose.

"Thanks," he said as he plucked the gloves out of the air before they slammed into his face. "You still can't come."

"Why not?" Quip whined, her arms solidly pressed to her sides and ending in clenched fists. "I'm a transgenic too!"

"You're also seven years old," he replied, "Not even Manticore would send you out yet." He pulled the gloves on, completing his cat-burglar outfit. He already had on the boots, the reinforced black jeans, the black turtleneck, the vest, the jacket and the backpack with the rest of his gear. "Sorry, Quip, but you're going to have to spend this one at headquarters." Where no one wanted to kill her.

She sent him a scathing look and stomped off toward the pantry with as much of an indignant air as she could muster.

Yesterday he had cleaned out the supply of electronics he had in the pantry by selling them off to a tech dealer. After he had gotten the prices he had wanted, he had bought a couple things with the extra cash, just some big pillows and bed stuff, and put them in the empty pantry for Quip. His efforts to get her to sleep in his bed while he took the couch had proved fruitless over and over again, so making her her own space was the only way he could think of to get her off his couch.

The door slammed behind her with a crash. It was hard to slam a sliding door, but she managed it, leaving him feeling effectively dissed by a seven-year-old.

Rolling his eyes, Alec went back to getting ready for the mission. He didn't expect to come across more than he could handle, but he'd found out during his months outside of Manticore that gangsters could be tricky. They usually didn't like it when things went off track, and Alec doubted this Krenski guy would be much different. There'd be a shitload of guns, ammunition and pissed-off minions when it all went down, and Alec wasn't looking forward to being in the middle of it.

He definitely didn't want Quip anywhere near it.

After slipping a second automatic into a holster on his leg, he walked over and knocked on the pantry door. "Come on, we have to go over to Logan's."

There was silent recalcitrance from the other side of the door. He sighed and slid the door open. Quip was sitting on her plush pillow-bed, legs and arms crossed, completely sullen and sulking. Leaning against the doorway, he smirked down at her. "How do I look?"

"Like a jerk," she replied without a second thought. A moment later, she looked up at him, eyes wide. "Please?"

"No," Alec replied, gesturing for her to get up, "Let's go." She did it, but she was reluctant about it, scowling at him from behind her shaggy blond bangs. He gently shoved her out of the pantry and through the kitchen while she dragged her feet.

The walk to Logan's was cut short by Alec hotwiring someone's beat-up car a few blocks from and driving most of the way there. The ride was silent. Quip leaned heavily against the door and drew shapes in the fog left by her breath on the window.

Alec didn't try to strike up a conversation with her. He knew the kid was pissed, he knew why she was pissed, and he could respect that. That didn't mean he was going to coddle her right now. As far as he was concerned, she needed to learn her limits and the sooner the better. The only thing worse than a regular inexperienced grunt was a grunt that thought she was ready when she actually wasn't. That's how people were killed.

She was still silent when they got into the elevator to go up to Logan's apartment, but when Alec reached for the penthouse button, she darted forward and pressed it before him. She didn't look up at him. Instead she leaned against the wall of the elevator and glared at the door, but he could guess what that was all about. She was letting him know that she remembered which floor Logan lived on, trying to show him that she was good at what she did. Smart, sort of subtle, but still not working with him.

When the doors opened into Logan's apartment, Alec left the elevator with Quip marching behind him with a dull, Manticore expression on her face.

Logan ducked out from one of the rooms and smiled, but it wasn't a real smile. Like Quip, he was probably annoyed that he couldn't go on the mission. Of course, one day Quip would have enough training for this type of mission while Logan…Logan was human. He'd never have super strength or stamina or speed, all of the things that transgenics were born with and grew up using. Logan was always going to be human and consequently weak. He could go, but he'd never be as good at it as a transgenic. And for some reason, Max liked that about him; maybe she had some kind of kinky dominatrix side that Alec didn't know about.

"Hey, guys," Logan said as he walked down the hallway toward them, "How's it going?"

"The kid's pissed. Have fun," Alec said. He looked over Logan's shoulder, wondering where the Ice Queen was. "Max already out doing the superhero thing?"

"No, she's eating dinner…" Logan said, glancing over at Quip. Before Logan could ask any questions, Alec strode past him, Quip at his heels. Maybe the kid was planning on stomping on his feet when she got the chance.

"And come on in," Logan commented sarcastically under his breath, probably knowing they could hear him, "Make yourselves at home."

While Logan retreated into his personalized Geek Den of Eye's Only-dom, Alec found Max at the dining table. She was hunched over a plate of homemade spaghetti, her fork swirling around the last of the thin noodles. On the other side of the table was a half-eaten plate of spaghetti, probably Logan's and between the plates was one lonely flickering candle.

She looked up when Alec came in and popped the last forkful into her mouth, which automatically turned down into a scowl. Was it just him or did she always frown when he came around? Swallowing, she turned her attention to Quip, not even saying hello to him besides a general nod.

"Hey," she said, "What's wrong?"

Quip shrugged and looked at the floor, obviously trying to burn a hole through it with her non-existent heat vision.

Alec rolled his eyes, leaned down and grabbed Max's glass of wine. Ah, Logan, such a hopeless romantic. "She's mad at me."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" Max said, her eyes narrowing so that she looked exactly like Quip and every other female transgenic that had glared at him over the years. That was really a startlingly large number, now that he thought about it.

Alec took in a breath through his teeth. "I knew you were going to say that." He gave a strained smile then drained the rest of her wine. He didn't tell her why Quip was mad. Nope, he preferred to let her think that she could make it all better then figure out all on her own just why she couldn't show that she was a nicer person than he was.

Leaving them to their girl-talk, Alec wandered into the kitchen, wondering where Logan had stashed the rest of the spaghetti. The guy always had leftovers when he cooked. Just as he honed in on the Tupperware container on the second shelf, it became obvious that Max had found the reason for Quip's anger.

"He sort of has a point," Max was saying. Alec put the bowl into the microwave and grabbed a fork from the silverware drawer while he listened to Max's attempts to reason with the pint-sized assassin-in-training. "It's not that you're not capable—" Ooo, bad choice, Max.

"Then why can't I go?" Quip replied, sounding more persuasive than whiny, "If I'm capable, then I should get to go. That's fair."

"But see, even if you're capable, that doesn't mean you need to go."

"But I want to go!" Quip replied, "I can help, I promise."

The microwave gave a pleasant ding, and Alec scooped the container out of it, not even waiting for it to cool before plunging his fork into the pasta and sauce. Damn, but the Ordinary could cook.

"No, Quip, that's Manticore talking," Max tried to explain, "They've got you wired so you think you need to go with us, but you—"

"If I'm wired that way, then that's the way I am, right?"

"That's what they want you to think."

"No, that's my essential being!"

Points for the genius kid with the big vocabulary and elementary psychological warfare training.

"What? Look, you're confused. You don't understand yet-"

"What don't I understand?"

"That you were brainwashed by Manticore to be the perfect soldier, but you're just a child! That's what you are out here, a little kid."

Quip's voice was cold. "That's not all I am."

Alec put the Tupperware container into the crook of his arm and walked back into the dining room. The air was tense as the two females stared each other down, equal in their determination to win this argument even though the age gap between them should have made this an automatic, uncontested win for Max. Then again, Max didn't know how to deal with X8s.

"Quip, stand down, kiddo," Alec said as he walked by her, talking around a mouthful of spaghetti. When she stayed rigid, he nudged her gently with his knee. He watched most of the fight drain out of her as she looked up at him with his own eyes. She knew what he was going to say; he had been firm and made it clear that he wasn't going to be won over by any of her arguing, pouting, whining, bargaining or fighting. Not this time. Instead, she flounced off into the kitchen, her little sneakers squeaking when they hit the tile.

Smiling, he looked over at Max. "Score for Logan on the spaghetti. This stuff is awesome." He dug into the spaghetti, ignored the way she was staring at him, and ate another forkful. "Really awesome."


	19. Chapter 19

Six hours later, and Quip was hiding between the couch and the wall with a couple of Logan's books that she had lifted from his bookshelves. Logan had tried to get her to call those people in Canada again, but Quip hadn't been in the mood to talk, hence her hunkering down behind the couch where Logan couldn't reach her without moving the whole couch.

It had been sort of funny for the thirty minutes he where he couldn't find her; she had blurred out of his office and into the living room, making sure to be quiet and not disturb anything. Of course, he had basically turned the apartment inside out and been sort of angry when he found her.

Logan half-heartedly tried to coax her out with ice cream and TV, but she didn't want any of that. There had been a little more placating, some begging involved, and then he eventually left her alone, retreating to his study to listen to the police scanner. After he had been gone a while, Quip had sneaked over to grab some books from the shelf before hunkering down behind the couch for good.

She was still mad at Max and Alec for leaving her here with the Ordinary instead of taking her with them to the airport. It wasn't fair. Yes, she was smaller, but she was a transgenic too, and she could be useful. She would've shown them that, if they had let her go.

Scowling to herself, she flipped through the pages of the book in front of her. The title, _War and Peace_ , had caught her eye, but it really wasn't that interesting. The other book was one about a fish-type transhuman who ended up marrying a prince. It was a simple story and too short for her tastes. At least the artwork was pretty.

Leaning back against the wall, she listened to Logan typing on the keyboard of his computer and wondered when Alec and Max would get back. Logan was okay, and at least he didn't really treat her like a little kid, but he didn't seem to know how else to treat her either. He just looked generally uncomfortable when she was around, like he didn't know what to do with someone half his size. Quip personally thought he was a little weird but tolerable at least. Except when he was trying to make her call those Canada people.

She poked at the back of the couch. Why was everyone so obsessed with sending her to Canada? Okay, so she had shown up with a bullet wound that they had taken upon themselves to deal with and then they had to go after Krenski, but she hadn't really wanted to go to the hospital anyways, and she had offered to help catch Krenski. It didn't seem like she had done anything to deserve being exiled to Canada.

The people had sounded really nice on the phone, as if they genuinely wanted her to come live with them, but Quip was apprehensive. She knew that they had no idea what she was, and she wasn't particularly comfortable with that. There had been horror stories told in her unit about how some of the older series had serious defects, like insanity and something awful called 'the shakes,' and there was always the fear that there was some hidden defect in their own genome. What if she went off to Canada and suddenly developed some serious problem, and they took her to the hospital and they found out what she was?

What would they do with her then?

No, she really didn't want to think about that. She had managed well enough in Seattle without anyone. She could do it again if Alec didn't want her hanging around. But if everyone really thought it was best for her to go to Canada…

Setting the book to the side, she drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head on her arms. Why couldn't she just pay Alec rent for the pantry and stay in his apartment? They could set up some kind of system and everything, it's not like he had to provide for her. She could take care of herself, she didn't need him. He wouldn't even notice she was there; she would be the best apartment mate ever. She didn't want to go live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, even if there would be horses and puppies and other kids to play with. She was a transgenic. She didn't play.

A familiar whir caught her ears, and she jerked her head up. The elevator! She scrambled to her feet and slipped out from behind the couch, heading toward the entrance to the apartment.

She saw Logan lean back, a pen hanging from the corner of his mouth. He raised an eyebrow at her. "Elevator?"

She nodded and continued on her way, not bothering to see if he was going to follow her. The elevator door opened just as she reached it, and the strong smell of Alec's blood hit her.

"You're hurt!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed.

Alec snorted and walked out of the elevator with the smallest of limps. He looked intact, but the smell of blood was too much for him to be completely okay. "Yeah, I hear that happens when you hang around people with guns." She looked him up and down, wondering where the smell was coming from, and noticed a patch of black jean material had been torn as the bullet had grazed his right calf.

"How do you always manage to get shot?" Max asked as she followed him out. She didn't sound as angry as she usually did when she talked to Alec, and she almost looked concerned. It was the way her mouth was set, Quip decided absentmindedly as she looked from Max to Alec.

"I don't know, Max," Alec said, rolling his eyes as he walked toward the kitchen, "Sometimes I think you stick 'Shoot Me' signs on my back." Quip followed, wondering what she should be doing. He didn't seem to be in pain, but he could be covering it up. He glanced down at her, eyes glinting with humor. "So, short stack, did Logan torture you with boring lectures about saving the world?"

She shook her head, and he gave her a reassuring grin before crossing over into the kitchen, leaving her to trail after him.

"Alec was shot again?" Logan asked as he walked out from his office, looking straight at Max for answers, "What happened?"

"Oh, the usual," Alec answered, "This bad guy decided I was a good target since I was trying to attack his boss. Sucks, really does, but since it seems to be my life now..." While he rummaged around in one of the cabinets, Quip crawled up on the counter and snatched a dish cloth from a rack. She couldn't just sit there while he was bleeding! She ran the cloth under the hot water as the other three talked.

"The cops were their usual ineffective selves," Max said as Alec sat down at the bar with the first aid kit and hiked the leg of his jeans up, exposing his gunshot wound. "They jumped the cronies too soon, and the plane almost took off again." She shoved a hand through her hair and then slammed it down on the counter. "Do they just hire those guys off the street?"

"Matt said he was going to make sure the team was good," Logan said, his forehead creased with a frown. Quip wrung out the cloth, letting the excess water drip into the sink.

"Matt has a weird standard for good," Alec said, poking at the bloody hole in his leg and wincing, "'Cause Krenski got away and a third of that team almost got taken out."

Max made a face. "And Alec thought it would be a good idea to jump in the plane…"

"Hey, I landed it!" he retorted.

"You crashed it!" Max snapped back, "And then got shot!"

"Yeah, well, maybe if a certain someone raised to be a soldier didn't have an adversity to firearms, I wouldn't have."

"Ooo, if you weren't hurt…"

Quip slipped off the edge of the counter and hurried over to Alec. She held out the cloth to him, her eyes drifting to the bullet hole in his leg. He shouldn't have been shot, especially not when he was out there because of her. He followed her gaze and quirked a smile. "Stop with the worried face. It's not as painful as yours was. You're still more badass." Grinning, he took the cloth from her and started wiping the dried blood from his skin.

"So Krenski got away?" Logan asked, sounding disappointed.

Max gave a jerk of a nod. "Took off in an Audi, but I caught the plate number."

"Like he won't switch cars now that the cops are after him," Alec said. He grabbed some gauze out of the first aid kit and started wrapping it around his leg. "We'll be lucky if he even stays in the city. But we still got the drug shipment, that's a plus."

"I'm going to go find him," Max said, looking determined, "We can't just let him get away."

"I'll come with you," Logan said. They looked at each other, and Quip tilted her head as she tried to figure out the expressions on their faces and the light, wispy sweet smell that was suddenly mixed with the blood scent. Max looked like she was suffering but happy and Logan had a similar look on his face.

"You don't have to do that," Max said, and Logan took a step toward her.

"I want to."

"Logan…"

"I'm coming with you," he repeated.

What good was Logan going to be without his computer and other electronic stuff? And why did it sound like there was more to this conversation than she knew? The new smell was starting to compete with the scent of blood, and Quip was getting sort of dizzy with it. She had definitely smelled this before, but not in an enclosed space. It seemed to be coming from Logan and Max.

Alec cleared his throat as he tied the knot off on the bandage. It was good and tight, much better than the job Quip had tried to do on herself. "Well, I think I've personally had enough super-hero action for one night." Standing up, he flicked his fingers against Quip's shoulder. "Ready to go back to the slums?"

Quip answered by sticking her hand in his and looking over at Max and Logan, who were both pointedly not looking at each other now. Maybe this was some kind of Outsider ritual that she didn't understand yet. She turned her attention to Logan. "Does this mean the trial won't be tomorrow?"

Logan sighed. "No, we'll have to push it back."

"So…no Canada?" Quip asked, trying not to sound too eager.

"Sorry, but not yet," Logan said, "Unless you really want to. I wouldn't want to stop you just because something went wrong."

Quip shook her head quickly. "No, no, that's okay. I just wanted to make sure I could still help." She gave a big, innocent smile and ignored Alec's amused expression and Max's suspicious glance.

"Definitely," Logan said, not noticing the looks passing between the three transgenics, "We can use all the help we can get."

"Good, you still have your pint-sized, sob-story victim," Alec said, sounding a little peeved. Leaving the first aid kit on the counter, he headed to the door, Quip walking beside him. She let go of his hand to dash forward and call the elevator.

"We'll call you when we catch Krenski," Max said as she followed them down the hallway, "It shouldn't take us too long."

"You do that, Max," Alec said. He threw a smirk back toward her as the elevator arrived. "But if you catch him at five in the morning, wait to call. Some of us don't have shark DNA." The doors opened and Quip stepped in, leaning against the back wall. Max gave a small wave to her, and Quip gave a similar wave back. Max wasn't so bad, not really, but she did pick on Alec too much.

Alec leaned back against the wall next to her, a tall, fully-grown male mirror of her. "Looks like your stuck with me again for the night."

Quip shrugged. "The pantry is okay."

"It's the size of a closet, Quip," Alec replied, rolling his eyes.

"I don't think it's that bad," Quip said, looking down at her feet as she remembered all the other places she had stayed at since Manticore had burned down. Empty dumpsters, cardboard boxes, abandoned warehouses, cracks in walls, garbage cans, anywhere she could fit and feel safe for the night. The pantry in Alec's apartment topped all of those.

Alec playfully tweaked her ear through her hair. "If you say so. I'm just glad you're not giving me the silent treatment anymore."

"Maybe if I had come, you wouldn't have gotten shot," she said, glancing up at him.

He snorted. "Maybe not." He roughly ruffled her hair. "I bet you're not half bad with a gun." Before she could say anything in return, the elevator hit the bottom floor and opened into the parking garage. "Come on, let's go home."

Quip didn't comment on what he called the apartment, but she wished it was true. "Can I have ice cream when we get there?"

"I think there's double-fudge in the freezer."

"Awesome!"


	20. Chapter 20

For Max being all transgenic and old and Logan being the Eyes Only guy and even older, they were having a really hard time of finding Krenski, or that's what Quip thought. Personally, she didn't care whether they found him or not. She was content where she was, sleeping in Alec's pantry and going to Joshua's during the day to paint and play the piano and read. She loved to read, but after the fight about the history book, Alec had gone through Joshua's collection of books and removed the ones that he didn't think Quip should read yet.

Even though Alec had restricted her reading material, and she didn't get to eat chocolate on everything like she wanted, this life was a lot better than sleeping on the streets and staying in orphanages and other places like that. And she wasn't sure going to Canada would be better. She'd been reading up on Canada in the encyclopedia set at Joshua's house, and she wasn't sure if it was where she belonged.

Sure, she liked the outdoors, and there were a lot of pretty places to go and the people seemed nice, but she didn't know anything about Wayne Gretsky or skiing or maple syrup or French. Well, a little French; Alec liked to curse in a lot of different languages. No, she liked it on this side of the border; she could visit up there, right? But Logan had found her a family, and kids were supposed to have families. They said so on day time TV talk shows.

Quip wasn't sure why Alec couldn't be her family; he didn't have one, and she didn't have one, so couldn't they be in one together? She wasn't sure what the rules were about families, but she thought that they could bend them a little…

Tonight, she was entertaining herself while Alec was at some place called Crash. He hadn't wanted to leave her at the apartment by herself, but she had made the argument that she could kill a normal human twice her size in at least thirty-four ways and had been left alone in the woods on survival training since she was at Level One.

Alec had retorted that thirty-four wasn't very many and that the forest around Manticore was a hell of a lot different than an apartment building in Seattle. Quip agreed, that yes, it was different, and wouldn't you know, she hadn't had to fend off crazed Nomalies the handlers let loose or eat raw squirrels she killed herself or fight with other X6s who she had been pitted against. Alec had finally relinquished his silly idea that it was a bad idea to leave her here alone when she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself.

So Quip had the place to herself while Alec did whatever he was supposed to do at Crash. While the earlier part of the evening had been spent lounging on the couch, eating the delicious brownie and the nasty vegetables in the microwave meal Alec had left for her, and changing the TV channel every two minutes, she was now getting restless. She leaned her head against the back of the couch and stared up at the cracked ceiling.

Flipping over onto her stomach, she started rapid clicking through the TV channels, indulging in past-time that Alec called 'channel-surfing.' Quip wasn't sure what surfing was, and when she had asked Alec to explain, he had given her some vague definition that involved the ocean and a long board and having to balance on the board. It sounded goofy. She made a game of blinking every time the channel changed, seeing how exact she could be with muscle control.

She could be very exact.

She was so bored.

Guuuuuhhh…Alec had been very specific about the rules when he had left her here.

One. Don't do anything stupid.

Two. Leave the knife drawer, the stove and the whole kitchen besides the fridge alone.

Three. Use common sense.

Four. Don't leave the apartment.

Five. Call if you had any problems, short stack.

Alec had left reluctantly, but he'd gone after making sure she knew those rules word for word; he'd had her repeat them and his cellphone number back to her twice before he had actually gone. Really, he was being sort of paranoid about it. She wasn't going to get into any trouble, not here. And rules one and three were a whole lot alike, making at least one of them obsolete. Maybe rule number three.

Quip slid off the couch on her stomach and crawled across the floor commando style. Her bullet wound was healed up, for the most part, and didn't really even hurt her any more. She creeped her way over to the bookshelf before standing up. The books here were all pretty boring, mostly about mathematics and science. Alec said that he kept them for show, which meant he liked for people to think he read them, and they did look good on the shelves. Still, Quip thought it'd be good if they sold those books and replaced them with good ones.

Sighing, she pushed away from the books and trudged toward the kitchen. She knew that she wasn't supposed to do anything in the kitchen besides mess with the fridge.

Therefore, she spent the next fifteen minutes going through the fridge and reorganizing it so that all of her favorites were on the same shelf. Granted a lot of these were also Alec's favorites, but he could get them if he bent down real low. Besides, he said that she could play with the fridge, sorta.

While Quip was going through the fridge, she noticed that they were out of chocolate syrup. It was a black market item that Alec always kept around and something that Quip sort of loved. A lot. One night, when she had thought Alec was asleep, she had squirted a good part of a bottle into a glass and had drunk half of it before Alec had descended on her with frightening wrath. Supposedly it wasn't good to drink straight liquid chocolate if you were part cat, and, according to him, apartment mates didn't pull sneaky tricks like that, anyways. From then on, Quip had settled for getting syrup in whatever form she could besides straight, but now they were out.

She closed the fridge door and leaned against it, frowning. This was not cool. There had to be chocolate syrup…there was always chocolate syrup.

There was a little market at the corner of their street, and it was open late. The family that ran it had a lot of kids, so they could force all of them to work random hours in the shop; Alec had taken her there at 2 in the morning a couple nights ago to get popcorn since neither of them could sleep.

One of Alec's rules had been to not leave the apartment, but she didn't think he would be too mad at her, especially if she came back with chocolate syrup that she had bargained for herself. He had been teaching her the finer points of making a good deal, and she wouldn't mind practicing those skills without him hovering. Besides, the market was just at the end of the street. It couldn't be that dangerous for a soldier like her to walk to the end of the street and back.

Making up her mind, Quip opened one of the drawers where she knew Alec stashed extra cash and got out a handful of dollar bills. None of them were larger than a five, and she was sure that the syrup wouldn't cost most than fifteen dollars. Hopefully she could haggle the price down to something like ten dollars or maybe even nine; Alec would have to forgive her rule-breaking if she made a good deal.

A quick stop in her room to grab her jacket, and Quip was ready to go, all decked out in her red jacket with the hood so she could pull it up over her face, which she did before leaving the apartment. She knew from her time on the streets that there were people who liked to kidnap kids and use them for…really bad things, like in the book about the Chinese women that Alec hadn't wanted her to read. She didn't really have to worry about that since she could break bones with ease, but still, there was some degree of danger in going out at night.

She hesitated at the doorway, her training kicking in. Back in Manticore, breaking a rule would get you into serious trouble, but Max and Alec had told her that she wasn't in Manticore anymore, and things that were wrong in there were okay out here. So this was one of those instances in her mind. Yep.

Pushing through her uncertainty, she hurried through the door, closing it behind her and locking it with the secret key Alec had shown her that he hid under their neighbor's doormat. The guy who lived in that room was basically a 'hermit,' which Alec said was something like a person who never bathed, who ate special brownies and yelled at you if you knocked on the door. Since he never came out of his apartment, his doormat was the perfect place for their secret key, or that's what Alec thought.

Quip slid the key back under the hermit's mat and headed down the hall, pulling the hood of her jacket up over her head. It had been raining earlier today when she and Alec had walked home from Joshua's. It was a long walk, but Quip always liked that time of day best because she and Alec just talked about whatever. It was fun, especially when he let her ask whatever she wanted. Like how people not made in Manticore were created. He hadn't really answered that one, except he had said that she was supposed to stay away from boys from now until she was forty, which she had no problems with since she didn't know any boys.

Outside, it was still raining, but it was more of a steady drizzle, which Quip thought was worse than a downpour. It was sticky and muggy, and she didn't like it at all. Maybe that was the cat in her.

Quip trotted down the stairs and took a right, heading in the direction of the store, her shoes splashing through oily mud puddles. The street people, which was practically everyone, took no notice of her. This sector was slightly more upscale than others, but it was still a dump. The whole city was. Just one more abandoned kid walking through the streets didn't cause a stir.

The walk to the store was uneventful. What was the point of mugging a kid? It wasn't like she was going to have any money; the only reason someone would go after her was because there was nothing better to do or if they thought she was running drugs, but she was fairly certain she'd be able to handle herself if something like that happened.

The dingy bell rang as Quip pushed the door of the store open, the metal squeaking in protest. The door and windows were covered in bars; the owner was paranoid about the store being broken into. It wasn't a farfetched fear; break-ins were common when necessities were on the line, and there was also the fact that the store doubled as his family's home. All of them slept in a back room that used to be a storage room, or that's what Alec had told her.

One of the preteen girls was running the counter. A loose brown ponytail hung down over her shoulder, and she was wearing a lot of eye shadow. She eyed Quip and then glanced toward the door with a frown. "Where's your brother?" she asked, her jaw moving up and down as she worked on chewing a piece of gum.

"He's at work," Quip answered automatically.

The girl shrugged and halfway closed the magazine she had been reading, eyes narrowed. "Ya got money, kid? What you need?"

Quip knew where the chocolate syrup was; she'd seen it the last she and Alec had been here. She darted over to that aisle, snagged one of the two bottles there and went to the counter. "This. I'll give you three bucks for it."

The girl laughed, and Quip saw that her gum was bright blue and had tinged her teeth the same color. "What, you trying to make us poor? Twenty bucks, kid."

Quip glanced down at the bottle and then back up at the girl. "But it's a small bottle." It wasn't, really, but it couldn't hurt to play the ignorant child card. "I could give you five, maybe. It's all I've got."

"Yeah, right," the girl said, tacking a snort onto the end, "Tell you what, I'll let you have it for eighteen, since your brother comes in here a lot."

The bargaining went on for what seemed like forever to Quip. While she was haggling, a few people came into the store and browsed around. Eventually, she managed to get the girl the girl to take eleven dollars for the bottle, which she thought was a really good deal, but she was starting to worry that Alec would get home before she did.

She handed the girl the money and hurried out the door. Alec was supposed to be at that Crash place for a couple more hours, but Alec could be unpredictable. It'd probably be bad news for her if she wasn't there when he got home, even if she had gotten the syrup for less than what he could get it for. He'd probably say she couldn't have any more chocolate or he would make her talk to the Canada people or something. They were nice, but Quip wasn't entirely sold on the Canada idea. They were just a smidge too sweet, and Canada wasn't anything like Seattle, and Seattle was her home now, and…

There was something wrong. Quip didn't stop, knowing that would only alert the two men who were following her that she knew they were there. She took in a deep breath as a bit of a breeze brushed their scents forward from behind her. There was no alcohol smell, so they weren't drunk, but they did smell like cigarettes, vodka and adrenaline. Lots and lots of adrenaline, and the smell of the corner store was fresh on their clothes. They must have been the people who had come into the store while she was talking to the counter girl; she'd barely taken any notice of them except to note that they were two guys, Caucasian, both with dark hair, dark eyes and dark clothes.

Instincts told her to turn around and fight them off, but her knowledge of battle tactics reminded her that they were grown men, and she was a very small girl, no matter how lethal. Normally, she would have been able to take them, but something about their scent and the excess of adrenaline told her that fighting them wouldn't be like a normal transgenic-vs-humans fight. These guys were hyped up on something, and Quip didn't know if her strength would be able to overpower the boost they were getting.

She took a sharp right and darted through traffic, which at this time of night consisted of about two cars and a handful of street bikes that drove sporadically through the neighborhood. Her senses were running on high, and she could hear the two men change direction after she did. They must not have cared if she knew they were there or not because they were speeding up now, gaining on her.

A sliver of fear pricked her, and Quip broke into a sprint, heading in the opposite direction of the apartment building. Immediately, the two men sped up as well, their giant boots pounding the pavement. Quip kept to the sidewalk, weaving in and out of pedestrians, hoping that the foot traffic would slow down her pursuers. She felt like she was back at Manticore, going through a simulator where one of the older transgenics was tracking down her team, and she had to evade them at all costs. Otherwise there would be the punishment of being strapped down to that chair and the red light…She put on another burst of speed, but they matched her for it, still gaining.

Who were these guys, and what did they want with her? She hadn't done…oh, no. Krenski. They had never found him, and she doubted that he had forgotten about her. But he didn't know where she lived! But if he had a lot of people working under him, and they had probably been searching for her…but there had to be a lot of blond kids in the city, how could they it was her? Her feet beat against the pavement, but it wasn't enough.

The fingers of the taller of the two guys brushed against the hood of her jacket, and she gritted her teeth. This wasn't the time to be jogging. She transitioned into a blur, but even that didn't seem to stop these guys. They just kept coming, as if they were transgenics, but they didn't smell right. There was a specific Manticore scent, and these two didn't have it.

Store fronts, people and sidewalk turned into dark streams of color and sound, but she could hear her pursuers clearly. They didn't say anything, but they didn't stop coming either. Panicking, she took a turn and fled up a flight of steps where a lot of people were walking. There was a corridor that opened up into some kind of plaza where a lot of people were camping out. It was huge, and there were at least three floors, but it was all open and so were the front of the apartments, if that's what they were. There were busted out windows and people milling around in front of fire barrels; there was barbed wire across some of the doorways and people guarding them. The apartments actually looked somewhat like stores, but Quip was certain that she wouldn't be able to hide in any of them. These guys were as determined as Gossamer Units, and she was scared. Really, really scared.

At least this place was confusing. Quip threaded her way throw a maze of fire barrels and blurred up a broken escalator that was decorated with yellow hazard tape and covered with all sorts of trash. It was guarded by a Japanese man with a rifle who yelled at her in Japanese before threatening the two men who started to come after her.

Heart pounding from fear and breath coming quickly, Quip sped up the escalator and into a side hallway. The hall took a sharp left turn, and she saw a space-eyed junkie sitting on the ground, using a cell phone. She leapt straight over a pair of sleeping addicts and grabbed the phone from the junkie. She flipped it open, and her fingers dashed across the keypad, typing in Alec's cell phone number.

Dead end. This hallway went nowhere. Heat burned at the corners of her eyes, but it would be useless to cry.

There was a pair of plastic trash cans up ahead that were surrounded by garbage. She ducked behind them, wriggling into the tiny space between the cans and the wall so she wouldn't be easily seen from the hall and cradled the phone to her ear. "Pick up, pick up," she hissed into the receiver as the dial tone boomed in her ear. She knew it wouldn't be long before they found her.

"Hey—"

"Alec!" Quip cried, relieved he had actually answered. For a moment, she forgot that she was a trained soldier, an elite biological tracking machine worth millions of government dollars well spent. She was seven years old and scared, and no one could help her, not even Alec, at least not right away. "They found me, they found me, please come get me! Please!"

"Who are _they_?" he demanded, sounding more like her trainer than the guy who'd been taking care of her. "Where are you, Quip?"

"I don't know, just come get me," she said, pleading.

"I can't come get you if I don't know where you are!" barked Alec, his voice tense and commanding. Quip sat up straighter and stared out of the small space between the trash cans, wondering when they were going to find her. When, not if. "Describe it to me. Now, as much as you can."

Quip went over a brief, rapid description of where she was and how she had gotten there while Alec listened, asking short questions once or twice when she didn't describe something as thoroughly as he wanted her to. By the time she was finished, she heard the thick, heavy footsteps that belonged to her pursuers. They came closer, heading straight for her as if they could tell exactly where she was. She was too scared to say anything, but Alec kept talking to her.

"Quip, I need you to be brave, all right? I'm on my way, just stay hid—"

The trash cans were tossed aside like empty cardboard boxes, and she was exposed. Instincts kicking in, she exploded, an inhuman scream tearing out of her throat as she launched herself six feet straight up in the air. Both men looked startled, and neither recovered before her attack was complete. She came down on the right shoulder of the taller man and swiftly kicked him the head, snapping his neck, before jumping off him, using his falling body as a launchpad.

Quip was running when she hit the ground, but she wasn't quickly enough though. There was the familiar, terrifying electric hum of a tazer bolt zipping through the air, and before she could dodge it, the barbs burrowed into her lower back. Electricity zinged through her, making her convulse. She tipped forward and crumpled onto the grimy tile, her vision dissolved into white flickers before fading into a deep and uncomforting black.


	21. Chapter 21

The buildings went by in a gray-black blur as Alec pushed the stolen streetbike to the limit. When he had gotten the call from Quip, he had been attempting to get a fine young woman's number, but he was also unable to keep his mind off the half-pint he'd left at home. He knew should've taken her to Joshua's if he was going to leave her alone at night; she was too smart for her own good in some instances and then horribly naïve and kiddish in others. He wasn't sure where this current incident fell, but he'd be damned if he wasn't going to find her and fix it.

When his cell vibrated, Alec had known it was her. It was as if his Quip-sense was tingling, like that Spiderman guy from those old movies who knew instinctively when something was going wrong. Her panicked voice had made his fists clench, but he had gotten the information he had needed before whoever was chasing her found her.

The streetbike he had stolen had been right outside Crash and hotwiring it had only taken a few seconds; it was faster than finding a working car in that part of town.

Reaching the burnt-out mall had been the easy part. Throwing people around until someone finally told him that two grunts had run off with his kid might have been considered the hard part except for the fact that Alec was so enthusiastic about it. Street people were not ones to freely give information, but after they had seen how effortlessly he could break bones, they had been a little more forthcoming with the information.

The two men were huge, Caucasian and had left with a little blond girl that looked a lot like him about twenty minutes ago. They had been heading in the direction of the docks, but no one knew exactly where, though some scruffy Hispanic kid with a missing arm identified them as Russian.

Krenski had Quip. It wasn't hard to put the facts together. He had probably been doing an ever widening sweep of the area where Quip had seen him and had been searching for the kid that had one-upped him.

Alec cursed at himself as he pushed the bike to its limit, dodging around other vehicles and narrowly missing pedestrians who wandered into the street. He should've protected her better, he should've helped Max and Logan find that damn Russian when they couldn't do it on their own, he should've…He should've done a lot of things, but dwelling on the possibilities wasn't going to help Quip.

He needed a plan, an infallible one, but it was impossible to actually make one without knowing anything besides the fact that Krenski's grunts had snatched Quip and he was going to make them painfully regret it in the most literal sense.

When he reached the docks, he parked the stolen streetbike and left it in a semi-hidden spot between some old pylons. Cold air wafted in off the sound and there was a quiet electronic noise carried on it.

Alec ducked behind a concrete pillar as a hoverdrone floated by, off on its search for petty criminals and people who didn't really deserve to be caught while…shit, Logan must've been getting to him. Right now, the hovering security device was a problem, and the sooner it was gone, the better.

Without anything to stop it, it drifted on, making its slow sweep of the area. When it had gone a safe distance, Alec ran out from behind his pillar and blurred across the street. Before the pulse, this area had been a big tourist destination, or that's what the old timers in his building said. He crouch down underneath a window that sported a torn sign telling about a mummy that was inside the store. A big creepy organ stood nearby, providing good cover from the streets.

If Krenski was as rich as it seemed, he would probably have tight security, though Alec wasn't very worried about breaching it. He was an X5, a damn good Research and Development project and Krenski had stolen something that was his; nothing was going to keep him from getting her back.

After checking again that his two handguns were loaded and ready, Alec headed to the back of the building. From there, it was easier to sneak around and not be exposed like he would be if he came from the front.

He thought that Max and Logan had searched this area, but it could be that Krenski had been moving around the city, never settling in one spot. That would be a smart move since he probably knew he had someone after him, though Alec doubted he knew exactly 'what' was after him.

Alec could smell something strange in the air, something else among the scent of the sound and bodies. The smell of chemicals, ones that he recognized. Reds. The African enhancement implant. He had had run-ins with guys hyped up on those before, back when he had run missions in Europe. He wasn't aware that any were in the U.S., but Manticore wasn't always big on spilling unnecessary information to its pet projects.

However, that made Quip's kidnapping make more sense. It would be difficult, almost impossible, for normal humans to chase down an X8. They were created for agility, flexibility and speed, not strength, but with a momentary boost, some people with Red implants could match an X8 for speed over short distances. It also helped that Quip was just a kid and not completely developed or trained; it would make it easier for Reds to snatch her.

Quietly, he followed their scent, sticking to the shadows, determined to locate Krenski's hideout and kill him or maim him, whichever suited Alec's fancy when the time came. Either was an acceptable outcome, though the maiming might be more satisfying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's short!!


	22. Chapter 22

A yellow-white glow stood out in the darkness as Alec approached a particularly weatherworn warehouse. The blackout boards that someone had nailed to the windows had pulled away slightly from the wall, allowing light to escape and give away the fact that the warehouse wasn't as abandoned as it first seemed.

Alec crouched down beneath the window, aware that someone as wealthy and connected as Krenski might have cameras placed for surveillance around the warehouse. However, he hadn't seen any so far, which indicated that this might be a temporary establishment for the mafia leader, one he had been forced to use when Eyes Only and his fanatically good sidekick Max decided to put the heat on him.

The window didn't give him the best view of the warehouse layout, but he telescoped his vision in, focusing on where most of the lights were situated. There was only four people there, all male except for the little figure in a red jacket tied to a chair between the two biggest guys, both of whom were holding rifles.

Unfortunately, they seemed to realize how dangerous the kid could be, which meant they probably knew what she was or at least had an idea of it. That could also be a reason why freakin' Reds had been sent to track her down; at least there only seemed to be the pair of Reds instead of an army. But damn, even going against two Reds was going to be hell…

Alec gritted his teeth as he focused on Quip. She was conscious, relatively unharmed as far as he could tell, and he could almost smirk at the deadly glare she was giving her guards. He would have to teach her a thing or two about strategy, though. A better approach would have been to play the scared, innocent little girl angle, even if a look at the back of her neck would have told them she wasn't so harmless. Still, it wouldn't have hurt to try. Too bad she hadn't gone through that training segment yet.

Or maybe she had, and she was too pissed to use it.

Pushing back from the window, Alec looked around, wondering which point he could gain access from. There were doors, sure, but they were going to be guarded or booby-trapped, most likely the latter if Krenski was a smart man trying to keep his location secret. The fewer people who knew, the less likely it was for someone to give him away.

This particular warehouse was only a very high one story, but a lot of the windows were placed high up on the walls, unlike the one he had looked into that was relatively low. Still, they were too high for him to reach, even if he strained himself on the jump.

Rolling his shoulders and mentally preparing himself, he jogged around the perimeter of the building, looking for an entrance point. He met up with the one loyal, inevitable guard on his way around the building and greeted him by snapping his neck silently from behind. The man dropped, but Alec caught him and stashed him without making more than a few scuffling sounds.

This wasn't one of those Max-run Eyes Only missions where everyone got knocked out and tied up for the sector pricks to go through later and release without any kind of justice. He didn't have time for that, and every second lost was one that might cost Quip her life. It wasn't a risk he was willing to take. Besides, the bastard should've picked a better boss than Krenski.

Old train car boxes placed outside of the warehouse made for an easy access into the building's upper windows. They must've been there since the Pulse happened; they were covered in a sheen of rust and looked pretty battered. Alec leapt onto the first one and when it held his weight with only minor creaking, he scaled the rest of them in a matter of seconds.

The window had been taken out at some point, so an open hole beckoned him to enter. Once inside, Alec crouched down on the black catwalk and peered down over the side. His mind cranked out about five plans as his strategy training took over, and he picked the one that was most likely to lead to success. None of them were particularly spectacular or fail-proof, but he was working with very few supplies. A pair of handguns weren't exactly what he would've chosen. He preferred an RH-72, a Manticore-issue gun that was the best sniper rifle someone could ask for, but the handguns would have to do.

Damn, he hoped this worked.

* * *

 

Quip could still feel the sedative in her system, but she fought against it, striving to be alert. She was effectively caught; there was no other way to describe her current situation. Luckily, she had already had some training for this, and she hadn't given away any information. Not that anyone had actually asked her anything. Mostly Krenski had talked to the other man, another beta. He definitely liked to surround himself with men who posed no threat to his dominance; even the two chemical-smelling men were beta in nature, for all that they were scarily strong and freakishly muscular.

"There was no one with her?" the alpha male, Krenski, asked one of the men who had snatched her. It was the second time he had asked this question. He must've been paranoid if he had to ask it twice. That, or he had a very, very short memory.

"Not that we could tell," the big man replied, his eyes drifting over to her before he flicked them back at Krenski. "She fled, and no one pursued us."

She hoped he was wrong. That phone call to Alec had to mean something…he had said he was coming, and he had never really lied to her. He wouldn't lie to her, so that meant he was coming to get her. She just wished that he was coming quickly, though her internal clock was still adjusting so she didn't know how much time had passed since she had been knocked out and now. She didn't know where she was, but she could place herself approximately near or on the docks when she added together the facts that she was in a warehouse and the entire place smelled like the waterfront. He would find her, he said he would.

Clenching her fists, she glared at Krenski as he crouched down in front of her. His right hand was in a white cast, still healing from when she had broken it almost two weeks ago. It seemed like a much longer time than that… The cast reminded her of the fragility of humans and her own physical superiority, so she relaxed, ignoring her thumping heart. Humans couldn't hear things like that when it wasn't their own hearts pumping quickly.

"So, little one, you're the one who has caused me so much trouble." He held up his right hand. "It's not nice to disrespect your elders, though I don't suppose you learned such rules in that place you were made."

Made? Did that mean he knew she was transgenic? She stared ahead, determined not to give anything away.

Krenski smiled. "I have looked into less criminal areas of research, as you can see from my hired help." He stood up and gestured to the two men beside her. She craned her head back to glare at him, and a slight movement in her peripheral vision caught her eye. She restrained herself from looking that way, but her mind processed the flicker of image she had seen. He had said he was coming…

"When you attacked me and my associate in that alley, I later remembered a certain project I heard of, one that was engineered to create super-soldiers who could fight like trained animals, even from a very young age." He moved to put a hand on her head, and she jerked away, scowling at him. Krenski chuckled but there wasn't any lightness in the noise.

"And you are very young. Not well-trained yet, are you?" He pulled away from her and turned to the other man, someone who looked a little like…like 293, one of her teammates. The moment she thought about 293, Quip pushed him from her mind. Not now, not now! The man had Asian features, dark hair, dark eyes, probably Korean. "Your associates will have to front a hefty price for her. She's a later model than most, so the price will increase, of course."

"Of course," said the other man, though there was something poisonous hanging on the words. His accent was stronger than Krenski's and definitely Korean. Quip didn't like him, and she didn't like a price being put on her. After spending time with Alec and Max and Joshua, she didn't want to go back to somewhere like Manticore. She wouldn't go back. "But you'll have to take in to account that she is, as you stated, untrained."

"If you're only going to break her into pieces to study the parts, I don't know how that matters."

Quip's eyes widened imperceptibly. Break her to pieces? They were going to take her apart? But why? She was more useful whole, she was a better soldier if she was left in one piece! Glancing up, she hoped that what she had seen was really up there because now she really, really wanted him down here. She didn't want to be here, she was sorry she left the apartment when she wasn't supposed to, and she would never eat chocolate syrup again if it meant she could go home!

"It's important to observe the whole as it is supposed to be, not in its beginning stages alone."

Alec chose that moment to jump down off the catwalk and land on one of the big guys beside her, possibly breaking his neck. He rolled off the mountain of muscle and had one gun unloading a clip into the smaller giant man's chest and forehead while he shot the Korean before training the gun on Krenski. Silence fell as Alec's guns went quiet. Now that was a whole, fully-trained transgenic they were getting to observe. Hopefully Krenski appreciated the opportunity since the Korean couldn't.

"Alec!" she said, too happy to see him to keep herself from saying anything. He cut his eyes at her, and although she knew she was in a looottt of trouble, she could also see that he was relieved to find her alive. Or that's what she was going to read into that look.

"Ah," Krenski said, holding up his hands even though the smile on his face said that he wasn't very afraid. "I suppose you've come to rescue your offspring."

"Sister, actually," Alec said, straightening up and training both guns on Krenski. Quip looked back at the big man with the broken neck. Shouldn't Alec at least shoot him a couple times? And…he had called her his sister. Not his clone, but his sister. He really thought of her like that?

"The family relationship doesn't really matter to me," Krenski said, waving one of his upheld hands, "But I have business partners who would be quite ecstatic to receive a matched pair."

"We won't be participating," Alec said coldly. There was no joking in his voice as he walked over to Quip's chair. With a deft motion, he put one of his guns up and grabbed a knife from his boot. The other gun stayed trained on Krenski's head. Alec sliced through her thick bindings quickly, and she leapt out of the chair, landing in a defensive crouch in front of him. Krenski was unpredictable, and she wasn't going to let him hurt or capture Alec like he had her.

"Little pitbull," Krenski said, taking a step back until he was up against a pole.

"Don't do that," Alec warned, his eyes on Krenski. Quip didn't know exactly who he was talking to until an alarm went off, shrill and intense. She screamed as it pierced her eardrums and seemed to make them explode. Her hands went to either side of her head as she was lost in the noise; she felt Alec grab her off the ground and move backwards as two pops sounded from his gun. The added noise seemed to stab into her ears like redhot spikes, and she felt faint, wishing her internal dampeners would start working.

Two big, warm hands fell over hers as she was set back on the ground, and suddenly Alec's face was in front of her, telling her to calm down even though she just wanted him to shut up. She shook her head, but now the noise was beginning to muffle, to change and decrease in intensity. The scientists had explained it once; her series wasn't meant for intense combat scenarios but for small, team-oriented assassination and tracking missions. Even so, loud noises like this were a risk so X8s were built with a sense-dampening feature that would save them from overload in this kind of situation. It only took a few seconds for it to kick in, but for Quip, it took forever for the noises to decrease. When it started fully working, she nodded to Alec and pulled his hands away.

"Better?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Good. Take this. Try not to use it." He shoved one of the guns at her. "And stay here."

Before she could say otherwise, he was gone, heading back into the middle of the warehouse where there were now fourteen more men, though luckily none of them brought the chemical smell. She looked down at the gun in her hands and then aimed at a man's leg, steadying her aim by using the wooden crate Alec had hidden her behind. There wasn't really a question. She would do what she was built for.

Fight.


	23. Chapter 23

Alec stood in front of his attackers, grateful for the gun in his hand, though he knew he only had a certain number of shots left. One less bullet now that Krenski was dead. Idiot. Like pressing a button was going to stop Alec from killing him. He only regretted not killing him earlier, but he knew that Max and Logan would've wanted him alive. Too bad.

Again, he found himself thinking that a Manticore gun would've been nice, like a machine gun or maybe a grenade-launcher. At least none of these guys looked or smelled like Reds, but the odds here were against him. There were fourteen of them and one of him, and they probably all had fully loaded weapons.

Taking the casual approach, he cocked his head to the side. "Come on, guys, can't we be civilized about this?" Hot lead whistled past his ear, and wood chips exploded from a crate somewhere behind him. "Guess not."

Blurring, Alec dove behind a random metal half-wall. Warehouses were always full of things like places to hide and duck behind, as if they were set up for gun fights and paintball wars. He turned around and started shooting, using the wall to steady his arms even though it wasn't really necessary. X5s were built and trained for this kind of situation, and very few things could mess with his precision.

After he dropped a couple of their number with clean shots through the forehead and chest, the Ordinaries got the hint and took cover. On his way to hide, a guy with a particularly large, fascinatingly misshapen head that had been an easy target dropped, a bullet wound in his leg. Quip must have gotten in on the shooting. He had hoped she would save those bullets in case something happened to him and she needed to defend herself, but maybe she would be useful in an offensive position instead of defensive.

Alec killed a fourth, clipped another in the leg and a big fat one in the arm, but those wounding shots weren't going to kill, though he had severed a tendon in the fat one that would keep him from shooting with that hand.

He was careful but quick with his remaining bullets. One of the men stuck his red-haired head out from behind a pole and probably had the chance to regret it for a split second before Alec's bullet found him.

The fat guy seemed ambidextrous and surprisingly agile. He managed to haul himself out from behind a low wall to shoot at Alec. All he got for his troubles was another messed up arm, but hey, at least the guy had some courage.

He wondered if Quip was paying attention to his order to stay put or if she had moved into a different position. As far as he knew, she would defect to her training and listen to him in a combat incident, but he wasn't entirely briefed on X8 protocol. She could technically have some sort of self-preservation brainwashing and suddenly view everyone as an enemy once shots were fired, though that didn't really make sense. He hoped that wasn't the case, anyways. He preferred to have her on his side instead of against him.

Bullets pelted the wall behind him, but none of them came close to hitting him. Crouched down, he moved along the wall he was hiding behind and crept toward where he had hidden Quip. Maybe now that there were less thugs, he could grab her and get out of here. Too bad she wasn't there anymore.

"Damn it, Quip," he growled. What didn't she get about the command, 'stay here?' It was easy, right? Plant your butt on the ground and stay. Irritated, he caught her scent and moved along the trail she had left. No, he didn't have her freakish nose, but he still had predator in him; he could smell that kid and keep up with her.

At least until she slipped through a crack too small for him.

Alec glared at the tiny space between the boxes. What the hell was she, a contortionist? Oh, wait, she was. By now, the for-hires had realized he had moved. Why they were shooting at him when their source of money was coloring the concrete a pretty red was beyond him, but maybe they were just thorough. Or maybe that wasn't Krenski? Or they had another source of payment…

Krenski was a Russian, and he was working with that mafia. Maybe it didn't stop at him. But these were questions for Logan to peer out his rainy window and ponder over, not for Alec to contemplate while he was hunting down his errant and elusive X8 clone. Doppelganger. Whatever.

A bullet came too close to his shoulder for comfort, and he returned fire with deadly precision. Lucky that, since it was his last bullet. Now Quip had the only gun with bullets, at least until he ran across a dead body. He lifted his head above a crate long enough to spot one such stiff before ducking back down again.

Whether the guy was dead from his gun or friendly fire, Alec didn't know and didn't really care. It was still a seven against two defensive, and though those numbers were much more in Alec and Quip's favor, he preferred to have a weapon. In a swift movement, he sprang up and over the crate, snatched the man's gun from his side and dove behind another set of boxes before anyone could fill him with bullets.

"That was fancy."

Alec gave Quip a deadpan look while she just smirked at him, high or something off adrenaline and battle endorphins. For an instant, he wondered if this was how Max felt when she was dealing with him…nah. "I told you to stay put."

"The advantage was from this point," she replied, the grin gone as she started into logical defensive reasoning. She crouched down next to him, both hands wrapped tightly around her gun. He doubted that she would let him take it back without a fight. "I couldn't shoot well from where you left me. There were too many boxes and other obstructions in the way after they took to ground."

Alec wiped at his face, growling. "I still told you to stay where I put you."

She shrugged. "Tactical advantage."

There was something flawed in X8 training. They didn't automatically jump-to when an X5 gave an order. He would have to worry about that later, though. The gunfire had stopped now that no one knew where he and Quip were, and he could hear the thugs moving around in the silence, searching for them.

He talked to Quip while he clicked the clip in the gun he'd taken from the dead guy. "Fine, fine. I think it's high time we left, and there's a window not far from here that we can go through." Locking the clip back into place, he turned and leveled her with a stare. "But you're going to pay attention to what I say and not go against any of my orders. Understand?"

"But it was a tac—"

"Quip!" he snapped, grabbing her wrist, "Do you understand?"

"Yes," she said, her eyes wide as she nodded.

He let go of her wrist and turned to look over the box. No one was nearby, but he knew there would be men along the line they would have to run to get to the window. He looked at Quip. She was fast and a smaller target than he was, so he wasn't too worried about her making it. He pulled her to him and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. "We're going for a window behind the far line of crates. It's the one with a clear view of the space where you were. Do you know which window—"

"Yes," she interrupted.

"Good. Now, if I blur, can you keep up?" The look she gave him was so incredulous that he almost laughed. "I'm guessing that's a yes."

"I could run laps around you, with you blurring," she said, her tone not really bragging but more stating a fact. He doubted that was true, but there wasn't time to argue.

"All right, then prove it by keeping up," he said. Nodding to her, he vaulted over the box in front of them. Quip leaped right along with him and came down on the other side before shooting off in front of him. She halted, glanced back at him until he caught up, which took less than a second. He tugged on her jacket to get her moving again; the thugs had spotted them and now bullets were screaming through the air again. Alec ducked as one almost clipped his neck, but he didn't stop to return fire. He thought that Quip might've but it was hard to tell; there was a space where she seemed to stop and then she was blurring again.

They moved through the warehouse, jumping over boxes and skirting around crates. Krenski must have still used this place, which meant Alec would have to tell Logan about it. These details grew in the back of Alec's mind as he concentrated at keeping Quip alive and not getting shot himself. With as fast as she could move, it was hard to believe Quip had gotten shot by Krenski in the first place. Maybe she had had an off day? Or it could've been from being malnourished. Or perhaps now that she was hyped up on so much syrup and chocolate all the time, she was in peak condition to run off all that excess sugary energy. Whatever it was, she _was_ fast.

Two more men were dead by the time they reached the window, Quip pausing in front of it, her gaze turned back toward him as if asking what to do next. Still moving, Alec snatched up a crate and hurled it through the window. Quip followed it like she was tethered to it, and Alec was last, backwards as he climbed through the window, firing shots at the men who clumped together, strengthened by their dwindled but still majority numbers. Alec finished off his clip, scooped up Quip so he could shield her from any stray bullets and ran. To her credit, she twisted around in his arms and balanced her arms on his shoulder to get in a last couple of shots.

Yep, she was him, all right, through and through.


	24. Chapter 24

Quip scraped her spoon around the rounded sides of the bowl. Technically, the bowl didn't have sides. It was spherical in nature, and spheres had no sides, but there was no other way to describe the boundaries of the ceramic dish. She had devoured the bowl of chocolate goodness that Logan had placed in front of her, but that didn't mean she wasn't paying attention to what the others were talking about in Logan's office. They thought they could distract her with sugar and cream and putting hallways and some walls between them, but she was an X8. Multitasking and eavesdropping were a part of her DNA.

"So there was no way you could've kept Krenski alive?" Logan was asking for the third time. It was her experience that Ordinaries' memories weren't as good as transgenics, but Logan should've remembered an answer that he had already heard twice. He seemed intelligent enough for someone who didn't have enhanced mental faculties.

"Nope," Alec answered. She heard him take a sip of coffee. "Look, I got Quip, dispatched some baddies and left. I wasn't too concerned with keeping him alive at the moment."

Quip sniffed at her ice cream bowl. There was officially nothing left worth having, and she was satisfied. Max had given her three scoops of metropolitan, and Alec had let her put on as many toppings as she wanted. She had stayed away from the chocolate syrup, though. She had a feeling she wouldn't be wanting that for a while.

"How do you think she's doing?" She could almost feel Logan glance at her through the rooms. Why was he worried about her? She was fine. If she had had more time, she would've gotten out of that chair by herself, but it was okay that Alec had shown up. Not that she really needed him to, it was just good to have back-up when you were in a bind like that. She usually worked in pairs or teams anyways, back in Manticore, so having someone else to work with was second nature.

"She's fine," Alec said, his tone light but cool, "Ready to go off to happy joyful family land whenever you want to ship her off."

Quip drew her shoulders up and tapped her fingers on the counter. Oh, yes. She had sort of forgotten about those people in Canada, the ones who wanted to give her a puppy and find friends for her and let her live in their house without knowing what she could do. She had hurt people tonight. It didn't really bother her too much. Well. It bothered her a little bit, but that would pass. They were bad, very bad, and they were going to hurt Alec and they were going to hurt her. She had acted in self-defense. But these people wouldn't really understand that, and they wouldn't even know about it. Logan wasn't going to tell them what she could do.

Slipping out of the chair, Quip picked up her bowl and spoon and went to the sink. She wasn't ashamed of herself. How could she be ashamed when she could outrun a bullet and track a man for days and pick out a certain target's breathing pattern in a crowded room? She liked the way she was made, even if she was just a prototype.

And if she went to Canada, she wouldn't be able to go to Joshua's every day. Quip liked going to Joshua's house and looking at the old things there; she liked sneaking around the basement and poking around in stuff she didn't know the name for. She liked reading the stories and poems in the dusty books, and she liked when Joshua made mac and cheese. Quip put her dishes in the sink and then climbed up on the counter so she could wash them with water. If she went to Canada, she might never see Joshua again, or at least not unless she was a lot older and could track him down.

"What do you want to do with her, Alec?" she heard Max ask. Quip ran hot water over the bowl and watched the last scrapes of ice cream melt off and drip into the sink. "What exactly is your plan, if she doesn't leave? Are you going to raise her?"

"Is it that terrible of an idea?" he replied. She rubbed a washcloth absently over the bowl as she focused on what was being said in the office. "She takes care of herself most of the time—"

"Oh, so if she couldn't do that, you wouldn't want her?" Max sounded very angry, but Quip didn't understand why. Quip prided herself on being independent and doing things on her own. She had been without supervision for months now, and she believed that she had proved herself to be a good self-regulating agent. She had been clothed, fed and sheltered most of the time, and she made due when she wasn't. She didn't need someone hovering over her all the time.

"That's not what I'm saying, Max," Alec said, "She's going to feel out of place with those people. She doesn't like being coddled. She isn't used to hugs and kisses and stuff like that."

"But she could get used to it," Max replied, "It's learned behavior. She'll like it when she learns it's good and normal."

"Quip's not normal." Alec laughed, but it didn't sound like he found anything particularly funny. "No matter how much you try to turn her into some kind of dress-wearing, lollipop-licking, ponytailed little girl, that's not going to be her."

"That isn't fair to her," Max said, "You just don't want to give her up because you think you have some sort of claim on her."

"Personally, I think I do," Alec responded, "But besides that, it doesn't matter if it's fair or not. It's life, and I think she understands that more than you do. Try to put her into that house with those people, and she's going to go nuts one day. She won't want to keep that secret forever."

"Might as well give her the chance," Max said.

"Just because that's what you wanted when you were little doesn't mean it's her one wish, too, Max."

"I should smack you—"

"She's not really old enough to comprehend the life changes," Logan said quietly.

"That so?" Alec asked, "Why don't you ask her? It's her future. You won't even have to catch her up to the discussion. She's probably been listening this whole time. X8 ears and everything, you remember."

There was a silent pause, enough time for Quip to turn off the water, slip down off the counter, and hurry back to her seat at the counter. She picked up a small bottle and started turning it over and over, watching the dark liquid inside fill the empty spaces as she turned it.

"Quip?" It was Max, still sounding annoyed but also apprehensive. Maybe if she stayed quiet, they would think that Alec was wrong and she hadn't been listening. But part of her wanted them to know. She wanted them to know that she could hear them talking about her when she couldn't talk back, and she didn't really like it. After a moment, she pushed away from the counter and padded down the hall, her socks scuffling on the wooden floors. The door opened just as her hand touched the doorknob.

Logan was sitting at the computer desk while Max leaned on the wall beside him. Alec was the one holding the door, a self-satisfied look on his face. Quip noticed the glances that Logan and Max exchanged as she stepped into the room, staying close to Alec. He seemed to be on her side in this, or at least that's what she thought. Not going to Canada seemed like the best option.

"So, you've been listening in?" Logan asked, a slight smile on his face.

She nodded. No point in lying.

"Quip, this is a big decision," Max said, "A really big one, with a lot of consequences down the road."

"I know," she said. She flicked her eyes up at Alec, but he was staring ahead, almost glaring at Max. "You want me to go live with those people."

"It'd be better for you." Max sighed and brushed her long, straight, pretty hair back from her face. Quip hoped that one day she would have long hair like that, even if short hair was easier to look after. "You'd be safer up there, away from the U.S. government, and the Piersons would love you. They'd let you have a real life, one where you don't constantly have to worry about people coming after you." Max looked down at her. "Do you understand that?"

"Yeah," she said, "They sounded nice, on the phone." She glanced over at Logan now. "They won't know I'm an X8."

"No," Logan said, shaking his head, "It's safer for you and for them if they don't know what you are. That way they can safely tell people that you're just a regular adopted kid and not be lying."

Quip shifted her weight from foot to foot and looked up at Alec. What was he thinking? She wished for a split second that she had some Psy-Ops in her so she could tell what he thought about this. Did he want her to go? Not that it really, truly mattered, but if she knew for certain that he wouldn't mind her staying in his pantry and keeping her place, she might be able to use that as an argument.

"You'll have the chance to grow up like any other kid, with a family and everything," Max said, and there was a far-off look in her eyes that Quip didn't know how to interpret.

"Quip." She looked at Alec again. He was pointing a finger at her, at the back of her neck, where her barcode stood out beneath her short hair. "No matter what, you'll never grow out of that." He was entirely serious now. There was no glint of humor in his eyes or a twitch of a smile around his mouth. "Even if those people never figure out what you are, you'll always know, and you'll always feel it." He looked away from her now, turning toward Max. "She won't be able to pretend forever."

Max scowled at him, crossing her arms over her chest. "She can tell them when she's older."

"Oh, so it won't matter if they kick her out of the house?"

Logan sighed loudly, and Quip glanced over to find him looking at her. She didn't want this attention. She didn't mind attention when it was on her terms, but right now, she would prefer if everyone found something else to stare at. "Quip, here's the deal. Seattle isn't safe for you right now. There are people after you, more than just Krenski and his—"

"I know," she interrupted, "There's White."

"How did you—"

She shrugged, not wanting to admit that this wasn't the first time she had eavesdropped on their conversations. Alec huffed and rolled his eyes.

"Canada's not safe for her, either," Alec said, "It isn't like White couldn't cross the border, and oh, hey, there are wolves and Mounties in Canada, both equally intimidating. And moose. Don't forget the giant moose."

He was being sarcastic, Quip could tell. She shuffled her feet together and looked at him. Did Alec want her to stay or did he want her to go? She knew he didn't particularly want her to go or at least he wanted her to have a choice, but did he want her to stay with him? No that she needed to or anything, but it was convenient not having to switch locations every couple days or weeks, and she liked that he got food for her. And it was sort of nice, you know, having someone to watch TV with and someone to teach her to play the piano. Not that any of that really mattered, in the long run of surviving, but…it was sort of…cool…

Logan sighed and steepled his fingers together like that guy in black in the action movie she had watched with Alec a few nights ago. "Quip, I think it'd be better for you in Canada. Do want to at least give it a try?"

Quip glanced at Alec again. Maybe now he would tell her that she could stay in the pantry… But he only wrapped his arms tighter around his chest and looked out the window, a blank look on his face, though his jaw was tight. She didn't really want to go to Canada…but no one wanted her here. Not really. Max and Logan wanted her to go, and Alec wasn't saying anything. Maybe it would be better in Canada.

"Ok," she said quietly, looking at the boring pattern on the floor. Maybe she could go live in the mountains and not even bother with people anymore. People were complicated.


	25. Chapter 25

Alec stomped down the stairs of Joshua's house, heading for the only solace he could think of right now besides whiskey. Actually, this was better than whiskey since alcohol burned out of a transgenic's system too quickly for them to be properly affected by it. He needed a distraction. Grouchily, he flung himself down on the piano bench and lifted the lid from the keys. It needed more tuning, but he didn't care about doing that right now.

He was trying to convince himself that he didn't care about anything at all right now.

Up in the living room, Quip was telling Joshua goodbye. It was obvious that the big guy didn't want the kid to leave, but what could they do. She had said okay. So now Logan and Max were going to ship her off like a dangerous little package to the frozen north, where she could chase moose and ice fish or whatever the hell they thought she was going to do up there. Pretend she was a normal girl.

He descended on the piano key like a thunderstorm, the keys practically crying out at the abuse as he played a song that was angry and fast. Perfect.

This was actually a good thing. He was getting rid of a burden.

No more snot-nosed kid eating all the food in his apartment. No more sugar-addicted short stacks demanding more chocolate syrup. No more sitting on the couch and watching TV together or arguing over who got the last cereal bowl or finding extra blankets for her pillow fort in the pantry.

See, lots less to worry about. He would be better off on his own, anyways. He didn't have time to worry about some annoying kid all the time.

The music surged around him, wailing from the piano. Still, he noticed when Quip sat down beside him, her hands over her ears, a grimace on her face.

"That song sounds mad."

"It's supposed to," Alec said as he pulled his hands from the keys, letting the song stop abruptly. "Are you already done saying goodbye?"

"I don't like it."

"What, the song?"

Quip shrugged, her fingers gingerly touching the piano keys. "No. Yes. Goodbye. I don't like it. But I don't really like your song, either. It sucks."

"No one asked your opinion. But yeah, about goodbyes well, there's always the option of disappearing without saying anything," Alec said, "But that tends to make people really pissed off the next time they see you."

"I might not ever see Joshua again," Quip said quietly. She pressed a couple of the minor keys, making the piano whine. "Canada is really far away."

"Yeah." He pressed a couple more keys, turning the whine into a harmony for a melody. "It is."

Quip let her fingers walk across the piano, picking out notes that went along with the quieter song he had started. "Might not see you either."

What did she care? She was the one leaving, the one who had made the final decision. Alec shrugged. "It's what you wanted, right? To go off and live like a normal kid?" He pulled his hands back from the keys. "It's never going to be like that here."

"I'm never going to be normal, either." Quip spun on the seat, turning toward him. "We're weird people."

Alex tried to keep his stern expression, but a smirk snuck onto his face. "Hey, speak for yourself."

They were both quiet for a few moments. "You might like it," he finally said, saying exactly what Max would've told him to tell her. Something to make her agree with them that this was for the best, that she was doing the right thing. But who was it the right thing for? "They've gotta be nice people. Logan wouldn't pick out stupid idiots to take care of you."

"They'll probably be boring though. Like Logan."

Alec snorted. "Yeah, definitely."

Quip set her elbows on the piano keys, creating a noise of discord, and looked ahead, her normally bright and curious eyes dull. "Are you going to miss me?"

Alec's throat tightened, and he coughed. "What the hell kind of question in that, squirt?"

"Will you miss me? When I'm not here anymore?" Quip leaned forward and rested her forehead on the keys. She mumbled something into the piano, something he thought he understood but couldn't quite make out.

He reached over and plucked the back of her shirt, encouraging her silently to sit up. She looked at him with those big hazel-green eyes, and he sighed. The ceiling looked nice. Maybe if he stared at that long enough, she would let that question drop. Seriously, why did she have to ask something like that?

"'Cause I'll miss you."

Looking down, he saw tears forming in her eyes. She blinked and then reached up to touch the wetness on her cheeks, pulling her fingers away to stare at them. Roughly, she rubbed her palms against her eyes, but the tears weren't stopping.

"Oh, shit…" Alec reached over and snatched her up, sliding her across the piano bench and into his arms. He hugged her tight and rested his chin on her head, trying to make her feel better. "Yeah, kid. Yeah. Me too."

Quip sniffled for a minute and then stirred in his arms. "Y-you'll miss you, too? How narcissistic."

Alex pulled back and raised an eyebrow at her. "Really? We're having a nice moment, and you go and ruin it…" He gave a weak chuckle and ran his thumb under her eyes, wiping away the last of her tears. "Look. I want you to be honest with me. You can say whatever you want. Okay?"

She nodded. "Mhmm."

"Do you really want to go to Canada?"

 


End file.
